Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Wednesday, February 21st, 2024.

It's the birthday of British poet W.H. Auden.

And in honor of the occasion, are you reading today his poem in memory of W.B. Yates,

which the great Irish poet, Auden published this poem originally in 1940 after the death of Yates the year before.

And it seemed like a particularly appropriate poem to read on the birthday of the poet as it begins,

as a very particular lament about the loss of W.B. Yeats, but it really does rise and bloom into

a meditation on the task, the legacy, the value of any poet and his body of work.

There's a kind of progression from the first section in which the

Yates is mourned, but there's almost a tone of bitterness as the speaker imagines what happens to a poem and its author after he dies.

The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living, he says.

Then in the very short section two,

there is a slight turn, and he acknowledges that the poetry of the man remains, though it is powerless to do anything.

But by the end of Section 3 and the conclusion of the poem, he's reconsidered that conclusion as well, as you'll see.

Here is W.H. Audens in memory of W.B. Yates.

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 keys. By mourning 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

...