Analysis Of Yeats's Death

Coming to terms with the death of a person important in your life, whether you knew him or her personally or not, can be extremely difficult. It is hard to put your feelings into words and adequately express the pain and darkness you are experiencing. On August 31, 1997, Princess Diana passed away, on June 29, 2009, Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, died - on these days the entire world for them. The world experienced the pain it is to lose someone in your life without even knowing these people personally. An estimated average of 1.80 people die per second. Hundreds of spouses, siblings, and friends that we know personally die every hour (http://www.medindia.net/patients/calculators/world-death-clock.asp). Death is a common human experience

There are hundreds of thousands words that a poet can choose from in order to perfectly express what he or she is intending to. As mentioned previously, Auden’s poem pays tribute to Yeats’ in terms of its format. However, their connections are not limited to this. These poems share a common theme of Yeats’ death. Yeats wrote his poem in September of 1938, and died that following January (NORTON CITATION). His poem is considered to be a self-epitaph, written as he anticipated his death. Auden wrote his poem the February after Yeats’ passing, as an elegy to Yeats and a reflection of his life and accomplishments (NORTON CITATION). Auden uses his diction to effectively elucidate the extremities of death. This poem is broken up into three distinct sections, which I believe are three separate attempts of writing an elegy, or eulogy of some sort, for Yeats. Each section takes on a different feel through Auden’s word choices. The first section uses the alliteration of words beginning with the letter “d.” These words have negative associations to them as well, resulting in a depressing tone. For example, Auden uses these words to emphasize the fact that “the day of [Yeats’] death was a dark cold day” (CITATION). By repeating words with similar sounds, not only creates an aspect of fluidness, but consistency and unity. I believe

Auden’s first section can be considered to be an extended metaphor. Over the first stanza, and briefly throughout the rest of the section, he compares Yeats’ death to winter. He writes that Yeats “disappeared in the dead of winter” and that “the day of his death was a dark cold day” (CITATION). These snippets from the poem exemplify how a day in the middle of winter, when its freezing cold and sombre out, compares to the day in which Yeats died. He uses this metaphor to provide a reader who does not feel a person connection to Yeats or has not experienced the extremities of death in their personal life with the ability to connect emotionally to the poem. By providing a visual image of death, and the depressing feelings that go along with it, Auden attempts to assist the reader in experiencing a fraction of what he, and the rest of the world, went through when Yeats passed. As mentioned previously, the second section carries a rather negative and degrading notion with it, mainly being constructed by Auden’s choice of diction. Specifically, Auden says that “poetry makes nothing happen,” implying that it is a waste of time and useless (CITATION). However, he says this in his own poem, creating a sense of irony. Further, Auden chooses to only write the subject of his poem’s name in his third section, allowing the first two sections to