Audenesque

Auden’s In Memory of W.B. Yeats is a poem celebrated with good reason. It’s an emotionally searing, intellectually substantive and formally acute piece of work that has all the trademarks of Auden’s brilliant wit. Above all the poem allows us to experience the transformative journey from the cold, despondent, mourning of the dead with which it opens to its opulent and reaffirming closing statements.

The three parts of In Memory of W.B. Yeats have a musical architecture inherent to them. At the very opening of the poem, Auden sets a scene that brings us to the dead of winter, to a time when nations are likened to barking dogs, locked and frozen against one another. The world is at war and, to add insult to injury, an artistic titan, William Yeats, dies on January 28th 1939 together with his much needed poetic voice.