Auden and Yeats - A Poem about a Poet

Wystan Hugh Auden once wrote a poem - "In Memory of W. B. Yeats". It is one of my most favourite poems that somehow border on the elegiac mood. The poem is quite long and exudes a very dense presence of knowing the past in the guise of the present. Here are the lines that affect me the most whenever I read the poem -

"...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."

Auden deleted these stanzas from the poem later on -

" Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and the innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique,

Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at their feet.

Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well."

Very critical and too incisive for my tastes. But it is the truth nontheless. Though the most politically significant lines speak about the contemporary European socio-political context, the above quoted lines could well have been the most important, or rather, rephrasing that, the key lines in the poem. I would suggest everybody to read this poem at least once.

Gentlemen, desist from belief

Doubt everything

De Omnibus Dubitandum

Doubt every single thing

GANGA

I was made of water and skies
and clothed in the tears
of a thousand moons.

I was fed the laughter of rivers
and housed in the fears
of a thousand homes.

I was born, but I never died.

I walked with the shadows
and within them too.

I rose from songs and fled into them.

Generations after I spoke of myself,
you speak of me as if you were me.

I, a dead shell of negligence, grow
and still grow on my own wild banks.

Messy, mossy lives – marred mud baths
in the sacred months and moons of light

and more of that there from where it all came.

I am the land, the living in it and the life.
They who live in me shall never die.