I <br />He disappeared in the dead of winter: <br />The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted, <br />And snow disfigured the public statues; <br />The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day. <br />What instruments we have agree <br />The day of his death was a dark cold day. <br /> <br />Far from his illness <br />The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests, <br />The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays; <br />By mourning tongues <br />The death of the poet was kept from his poems. <br /> <br />But for him it was his last afternoon as himself, <br />An afternoon of nurses and rumours; <br />The provinces of his body revolted, <br />The squares of his mind were empty, <br />Silence invaded the suburbs, <br />The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers. <br /> <br />Now he is scattered among a hundred cities <br />And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections, <br />To find his happiness in another kind of wood <br />And be punished under a foreign code of conscience. <br />The words of a dead man <br />Are modified in the guts of the living. <br /> <br />But in the importance and noise of to-morrow <br />When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse, <br />And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed, <br />And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom, <br />A few thousand will think of this day <br />As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual. <br /> <br />What instruments we have agree <br />The day of his death was a dark cold day.<br /><br />W. H. Auden<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/in-memory-of-w-b-yeats-4/
