“They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay;
Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.
All men have aimed at, found and lost;
Black out”
What is tragedy? Tragedy is the transformation of hysteria into a transcendental moment of joy. Metaphor begins here with the idea that everyone performs a tragedy, but few attain the level it deserves that is represented by figures like not just Hamlet and Lear, but Ophelia and Cordelia. Tragic despair and dread does not prompt complaints and moans, but requires rising to the occasion to meet it head-on.
“Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!”
Prefacing these final lines of the poem which are set off from the rest of the poem’s structure by centering alignment are the lines “No marble, no conventional phrase; / On limestone quarried near the spot / By his command these words are cut:” Prefacing those lines, the poem directly references his own final resting place in a churchyard in Drumcliff. And, indeed, if one goes to visit the grave of Yeats, one will find a tombstone on which the final words of this poem are engraved as the poet’s epitaph.
“Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence."
Repeated as the final line in each of the poem’s three stanzas, the line reflects upon the subject of each stanza. The first stanza is about Caesar, the second about a nameless woman presumed to be Helen of Troy replaces “His” with “Her,” and the poem concludes with a stanza about Michelangelo. The concluding line connects all three persons and the content of their stanzas together thematically to speak to the power of silent contemplative meditation as a dissociated component of great action.
“I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,
I sought it daily for six weeks or so.
Maybe at last being but a broken man
I must be satisfied with my heart”
The title of this tome is not “Last Poems” for no reason. As mentioned, the final lines of one poem literally became the poet’s epitaph. A recurring theme running throughout a number of others is the awareness of death approaching, its impact upon body and mind and how to deal with this dread. The opening of this poem directly addresses this theme with an image of the speaker confessing that his most creative days are past, leaving him struggling bring to the fore all the powers he compelled to do his aesthetic bidding in the past.
