The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.—W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”
The words are, as the title would suggest, Yeats’s poetry. What makes this so beautiful to me is that it merely tells the truth, yet it does it in (as befits a poem) the way of simple poetry, where an observation is crystallized like a small icicle on a branch of a pine tree. This is hard to do well in so short a space. In fact, the lines that directly follow it give us the another small observation on life, yet it takes Auden almost ten times as many words to deliver it:
But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.
Last week: Italo Calvino gets led by the ear.
Next week: Edward Burne-Jones shares a desire we’ve all had.
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