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 undempted by the fashionable quays. By mourning 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 rumors, 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 brookers 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. Stairs 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 unsuccessful 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.