酷我-北美枫

[anna]

In Memory of W. B. Yeats
by W. H. Auden


I
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 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 rumours;
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 code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

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.

What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

II

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.



III

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
_________________
---------------------

Anna Yin

《爱的灯塔-星子安娜双语诗选》
<Nightlights> <Seven Nights with the Chinese Zodiac> ...

http://annapoetry.com

[[星子安娜]]

In Memory of W. B. Yeats
by W. H. Auden


I
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 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 rumours;
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 code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

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.

What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

II

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.



III

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
_________________
---------------------

Anna Yin

《爱的灯塔-星子安娜双语诗选》
<Nightlights> <Seven Nights with the Chinese Zodiac> ...

http://annapoetry.com

[anna]

读书札记 （二）

Copied from book titled: The Poetic Art of W.H.Auden by John G. Blair

Page 92

From the start the poet asserts no particular personal loss in the death of Yeats; at most, he may e among the "few thousand" who "will think of this day/As one thins of a day when one did something slightly unusual." In fact, the painful insistence of the poem is that this death has had and apparently can have little effect on the world. Robert Roth points out that Auden's means for developing the poem are "anti-hyperbolic." The whole poem is a "conscious controversion" of the tranditional consolations of the pastoral elegy. Nature is totally unaffected; its only reaction to Yeats' last day is recorded by impersonal weather instruments. It is purely coincidence that "The day of his death was a dark cold day." The social world, with the exception of the few thousand whose lives are slightly affected, remains the same: "the poor have the fufferings to which they are fairly accustomed." The dea man himself, far from being ennobled by the poem, is described as "silly like us." Even his poetry cannot stand as a monument, for "The words of a deam man/ Are modified in the guts of the livings." The initial sections of the poem deny that personal lives have impact on the world. This death and the life that preceded it seem fruitless, for each man still lives in "the cell of himself" The anti-Romantic deunking of traditional eulogy offers a hard comfort to the reader. The projected view of human life insists on very limited possibilities for human accompolishment. However, the reader is led to assent at least to the rigid honesty and accuracy of the poems assessment. Through the medium of that assent Auden develops the universal significance of the death of Yeats, which is by implication the death of any poet, if not of any man. Despite the fact that " poetry makes nothing happen,""Time...worships language and forgives/Everyone by whom it lives." In effect, Auden is saying that though poets may die, language lives on, and the significance of the life of language is made clear in the final three stanzas:

Follow, poet, follow right
to the bottom of the night,
With yout unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deseart of the heart
Let the healing foutain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

After insisting that all men are actually trapped in a prison of limitations, Auden here affirms that the poet has accomplished one thing--he has made it concervale that men might freely choose to praise the life that they have. Once this universal significance of language and its poetic use has been accepted, it constitutes the value of poetry and consolation for the death of a poet. The reader may be moved to feel personal gratitude for Yeats, whose poetry has been one of the particular agents helping human beings to recognize and rejoice in the true terms of their existence.
At least Auden, in this poem, has created a credible justification for such gratitude.
Thus, the way in which Auden employs the occasional poem to establish a relation between the personal and the public is closely anlogous to his use of allegory. In this century the poet and his audience rarely feel direct personal relatedness to the large public world. For most the parallel connect between paticular and Universal or Absolute is also severed. Yet the particular, be it a human individual or an experimental datum, only gains significance by its location in a large world. To counter these discontinuities Auden's poetry has relied on anti-Romantic techniques that suppress the privately subjective and affirm the priority of the supra-personal and the retional. Poetic particulars are important only as they can illustrate or stand for a generally applicable insight or truth. By hard-headed analysis of the human situsation and the generallizaing devices of rhetoric and allegory, Auden leads the reader toward recognizing a larger scheme of thins in which he may have a personal place. The resulting poetry relies heavily on intellect in its construction and hence it demands a "thought-full" response. Those with Romantic expectations may find the poetry distant and unfeeling at first contact. Auden, however, hopes that an understanding of the general and abstract can serve as one step toward a renewed feeling for and contact with other individuals in the world. Men feel isolated from each oother partly becaus ethey fail to recognize overarching general truths to which all mean are suject. Metaphorically speaking, we are all in a circus tent called the human situation. Recognizing truths about our common hummanness can make us more responsive to the individuals sitting around us and to the performer in the ring, whose name might be Yeats, or even Auden. In religious terms one might state the case analogously:through a sense of the Divine, of what is beyond the human, one can come for the first time to love one;s neighbor. The process, as so often wiith Auden, is highly inderect, but it does propose a reasonable poetic means for coping with modern sense of isolated sujectivity.

我最喜欢这本书。
_________________
---------------------

Anna Yin

《爱的灯塔-星子安娜双语诗选》
<Nightlights> <Seven Nights with the Chinese Zodiac> ...

http://annapoetry.com

[[星子安娜]]

读书札记 （二）

Copied from book titled: The Poetic Art of W.H.Auden by John G. Blair

Page 92

From the start the poet asserts no particular personal loss in the death of Yeats; at most, he may e among the "few thousand" who "will think of this day/As one thins of a day when one did something slightly unusual." In fact, the painful insistence of the poem is that this death has had and apparently can have little effect on the world. Robert Roth points out that Auden's means for developing the poem are "anti-hyperbolic." The whole poem is a "conscious controversion" of the tranditional consolations of the pastoral elegy. Nature is totally unaffected; its only reaction to Yeats' last day is recorded by impersonal weather instruments. It is purely coincidence that "The day of his death was a dark cold day." The social world, with the exception of the few thousand whose lives are slightly affected, remains the same: "the poor have the fufferings to which they are fairly accustomed." The dea man himself, far from being ennobled by the poem, is described as "silly like us." Even his poetry cannot stand as a monument, for "The words of a deam man/ Are modified in the guts of the livings." The initial sections of the poem deny that personal lives have impact on the world. This death and the life that preceded it seem fruitless, for each man still lives in "the cell of himself" The anti-Romantic deunking of traditional eulogy offers a hard comfort to the reader. The projected view of human life insists on very limited possibilities for human accompolishment. However, the reader is led to assent at least to the rigid honesty and accuracy of the poems assessment. Through the medium of that assent Auden develops the universal significance of the death of Yeats, which is by implication the death of any poet, if not of any man. Despite the fact that " poetry makes nothing happen,""Time...worships language and forgives/Everyone by whom it lives." In effect, Auden is saying that though poets may die, language lives on, and the significance of the life of language is made clear in the final three stanzas:

Follow, poet, follow right
to the bottom of the night,
With yout unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deseart of the heart
Let the healing foutain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

After insisting that all men are actually trapped in a prison of limitations, Auden here affirms that the poet has accomplished one thing--he has made it concervale that men might freely choose to praise the life that they have. Once this universal significance of language and its poetic use has been accepted, it constitutes the value of poetry and consolation for the death of a poet. The reader may be moved to feel personal gratitude for Yeats, whose poetry has been one of the particular agents helping human beings to recognize and rejoice in the true terms of their existence.
At least Auden, in this poem, has created a credible justification for such gratitude.
Thus, the way in which Auden employs the occasional poem to establish a relation between the personal and the public is closely anlogous to his use of allegory. In this century the poet and his audience rarely feel direct personal relatedness to the large public world. For most the parallel connect between paticular and Universal or Absolute is also severed. Yet the particular, be it a human individual or an experimental datum, only gains significance by its location in a large world. To counter these discontinuities Auden's poetry has relied on anti-Romantic techniques that suppress the privately subjective and affirm the priority of the supra-personal and the retional. Poetic particulars are important only as they can illustrate or stand for a generally applicable insight or truth. By hard-headed analysis of the human situsation and the generallizaing devices of rhetoric and allegory, Auden leads the reader toward recognizing a larger scheme of thins in which he may have a personal place. The resulting poetry relies heavily on intellect in its construction and hence it demands a "thought-full" response. Those with Romantic expectations may find the poetry distant and unfeeling at first contact. Auden, however, hopes that an understanding of the general and abstract can serve as one step toward a renewed feeling for and contact with other individuals in the world. Men feel isolated from each oother partly becaus ethey fail to recognize overarching general truths to which all mean are suject. Metaphorically speaking, we are all in a circus tent called the human situation. Recognizing truths about our common hummanness can make us more responsive to the individuals sitting around us and to the performer in the ring, whose name might be Yeats, or even Auden. In religious terms one might state the case analogously:through a sense of the Divine, of what is beyond the human, one can come for the first time to love one;s neighbor. The process, as so often wiith Auden, is highly inderect, but it does propose a reasonable poetic means for coping with modern sense of isolated sujectivity.

我最喜欢这本书。
_________________
---------------------

Anna Yin

《爱的灯塔-星子安娜双语诗选》
<Nightlights> <Seven Nights with the Chinese Zodiac> ...

http://annapoetry.com