 In memory of W.B. Yates, who died in January 1939, 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 agreed, 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 un-tempted by the fashionable quays. By morning, by morning tongues, the death of the poet was kept from his poems. But for him, it was the 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 tomorrow, when the broken, when the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the bowers 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. Part two. You were silly like us. Your gifts survived it all. The perish 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. Part three. Earth. Receive an honored guest. William Yates 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, seeing 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 February 1939.