The Desolation Without Sun: an Analysis of Auden’s Line
Each line of a poem represents a carefully crafted piece of artistry that supports the whole work. Via intentionally placed words, punctuation, and sounds, a poem moves forward with athletic quickness or slow realization. In the first stanza of W.H. Auden’s In Memory of W.B. Yeats, all of these tools help to produce a poem that captures the weight of Yeats’ life, with lines that stand and bear the powerful weight of that man’s life and influence, as well as the conditions present at his death.
The punctuation of the poem produces a clear structure that urges the reader on with the energy of the thought structure it supports. In the first section of the poem, Auden notes that “He disappeared in the dead of winter:” and uses a colon at the end to produce a brief pause that trips to the next line, as well as for an emphasis that produces the urge to read more. In the next lines, “The brooks were frozen, the air-ports almost deserted, / And snow disfigured the public statues;” a series of images separated by commas, and ended with the briefest pause – a pause designed only for a moment’s worth of reflection before the stanza rushes onward.
The narrator’s voice goes on to the end-stop, the first full thought at the end of these rushing lines, by saying, “The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.” This stop effectively slows the current of the words in order to set up the lament “O all the instruments agree / The day of his death was a dark cold day.” Important here is the lack of stop between these two lines, as if the narrator had to force them out through grief.
To continue with this stanza, the language of each line constructs the full thoughts outlined briefly above, but also introduces strong images that stand on their own. “He disappeared in the dead of winter:” introduces a strong image of Yeats walking out alone into the darkness of winter. The power of this line is its representation of a highly dramatic scene, an epic scene large enough to fill Yeats’ life, and his leaving it, with the grandeur required for one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century.
The line sets the tone of the stanza, and the poem, as one of epic loneliness. This loneliness is reinforced by the images recurring in the stanza, “The brooks were frozen, the air-ports almost deserted, / And snow disfigured the public statues;” The desolation of the scene becomes stronger with each successive image. The subtext connects the loss of Yeats with the absence of warmth, the absence of the sun.
The last three lines “The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day. / O all the instruments agree / The day of his death was a dark cold day.” close the stanza with the image of the thermometer – “mercury” and “instruments” – agreeing that the day of Yeats’ death was unusually cold. Not only nature, but the cold and mechanical works of man felt the passing of Yeats, and the lines thrust the reader step by step into the cold shock of the described day.
Finally, as each line and its punctuation form and unify the thoughts of the poem, the sounds of the words themselves propel those thoughts. While the first line begins with speed, “He disappeared in the…”, using plosive consonants like ‘d’ ‘p’ and short monosyllables, the last part of the line elongates and slows like taffy in the mouth as the reader reaches the colon, “dead of winter:”. The vowels slow the line to the partial stop of the colon, and help to allow for the moment of reflection on the image.
The lines after this begin with the chewy ‘brook’ and ‘snow’ but end with words filled with plosives like “deserted” and “statues”. The impetus of these lines forces us to struggle to the emphasized plosive words that give the images their cold sting. This impetus begins to slow as the reader reaches “day” but the final two lines that make up the lament of the stanza slow to a brutal crawl with “O” and “agree,” “day” and “day.” The struggle through this cold time becomes clearer, and one can even visualize a person struggling with the shock of cold grief, struggling desperately to speak and eulogize with precision.
This poem, and this particular stanza, shows the very particular consciousness of the poet at work. Auden’s grandiloquent imagery saves no expense, but superbly reaches the reader with the desolation of a world losing one of the greatest expressers of the human condition. In this way Yeats’ becomes immortal, and the desolation of his passing lives on. As Auden writes “A few thousand will think of this day / As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.” The poem, like all good eulogies (and poems perhaps?), touches both the intellect as well as inspiring a visceral connection to language that few people can create, much less inhabit.
