In Memory of W.B. Yeats Death Quotes

Auden's language here seems to suggest all of the minor traditions and procedures that we use to measure someone's passing: the time, heartbeat, and other small significant details that we can determine. Latent in his phrasing, however, is the sense that there are things that can't be determined by our reason or technologies.

Yeats's body becomes its own city in this metaphor – a suddenly vacant space that seems, well, just a little bit eerie. Perhaps that helps convey the strangeness and suddenness of his passing. After all, empty cities don't appear all that often, do they?

This poem consistently separates Yeats the man from Yeats's poetic work: the one ends, but the other survives and modifies with each new reader.

Auden calculates the changes that Yeats's work will undergo during this transformation. Ironically, it's a very physical description. And taken in context of Yeats's disembodied (or, well, dead) state, the image becomes all the stranger.

Immortality isn't all it's cracked up to be, huh? Auden takes a wry look at the way the dead are truly remembered. Even someone as famous and inspirational as Yeats only gets a passing glance from most of the world.

Ah, tradition.  In the last section of this poem, Auden reverts to a phrasing that just about everyone has heard at some time or another. Tradition is around for a reason. It's soothing, and it helps us remember that these terrible, seemingly unprecedented losses have happened before.  Other people have died, and we've found ways to mourn them – just like we'll find ways to mourn Yeats.