Welcome back to the Daily Poem here in the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern. Today is

January 16th, 2020. And the poem that I'm going to read to you today is by an English poet

named W.H. Auden, he lived from 1907 to 1973. He is most famous for poems like The Shield of

Achilles and The Age of Anxiety and many other poems.

The poem that I'm going to read today is called, In Memory of W.B. Yates died January in 1939.

And indeed, Yates did die. Yates being himself one of the most important poets to ever write in the English language.

He died on January 28th in 1939. So next week, in remembrance of Yates' life and work, I'll read

a couple of Yates' poems around the anniversary of his death. But today I want to read this poem,

which is a bit long, called In Memory of W.B.

Yates. It's quite a famous poem, and it's written in three parts, and because it's a little bit

longer, I probably, well, I may not be able to read it twice, depending on how long it takes.

But this is how it goes. In Memory of W.B. Yates by Outen.

One.

He disappeared in the dead of winter.

The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,

and snow disfigured the public statues.

The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day. What instruments we have agree the day of his

death was a dark, cold day. Far from his illness, the wolves ran on through the evergreen forests.

The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays. By morning tongues the death of the

poet was kept from his poems. But for him, it was his last afternoon as himself, an afternoon of

nurses and rumors. The provinces of his body revolted. The squares of his mind were empty. Silence invaded the suburbs. The current of his feeling failed. He became his admirers. Now he is scattered among a hundred cities and wholly given over to unfamiliar affections, to find his happiness in another kind of wood and be punished under a foreign

coat of conscience. The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living. But in the

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