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ON THIS DAY 75 years ago January 28, 1939 something slightly unusualoccurred in he annals of English poetry. William Butler Yeats died, and his death gave birthto a poem that set off one of the most extraordinary elegiac conversations of our time.

The poem was W. H. Audens In Memory of W. B. Yeats,and this is the story of its astonishing afterlife how three separate elegies in three different countries weremodeled on it; how Audens words were quite literally, in Audens line from the poem, modified in the guts of the living,and how, in a feat that even someone as reputedly self-anointing as Auden could not possibly have foreseen, it went on to link a multicultural pantheon of greats: Yeats, Auden, T. S. Eliot, Joseph Brodsky, Derek Walcott, and Seamus Heaney.

Auden was a natural master of the elegy. His pen was ready, generous, candid, and quick to rhyme. He shot off elegies on Freud, Henry James, Ernst Toller, LouisMacNeice, and JFK, and his Funeral Blues,a fine example of the coherence of grief, has become part of crematoria cool after it was sentimentalized by Hollywood.But of all his requiem compositions, it is his magnificent and measured elegy for Yeats that has a seminal place in the canon.

It opens unceremoniously, with a brisk, almost businesslike stab but already bythe end of the first stanza, a blackness has begun to thicken:

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.O all the instruments agreeThe day of his death was a dark cold day.

Auden wrote these lines within days of landing in America, his new adoptive country, along with his friend Christopher Isherwood. It was a chilly time in the world, with the clouds of war massing over Europe; wrote Auden: the living nationswait / Each sequestered in its hate.Clearly, he was preoccupied with much more than the death of Yeats. Which is why the line, The day of his death was a dark cold day,resonates with the same premonitory dread of Poes opening in The Fall of the House of UsherDuring the whole of a dull, dark and soundless day [...]while

shivery beauty of The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying dayis occasioned bythe surprising but stunning inclusion of the word mouth.Something bad is going to happen, and it does, as we all too plainly know.

Auden and Isherwood, both gay, both conscientious objectors, both in search of freer frontiers, had emigrated together, and their leaving England was seen by many as a desertion of their homeland at a time of peril. Auden was going througha rather daunting crisis of faith his recent foray into political poetry (aboutthe Spanish Civil War) had left him feeling disillusioned and useless, and forced him to agonize afresh on the role of the poet in a violent world. Complicatingthings further was his cooling toward Yeats. He was riven with all the guilt and resentments of a former devotee. Not only had he outgrown the influence, but he also had serious problems with Yeatss pretentious casting of the poet as an ora

cular being, his fondness for wealthy patronesses, his obsession with the occult, and his disturbing flirtations with fascist thought. You were silly like the rest of us,he snaps irritably in the elegy. Your gift survived it all / The parishof rich women, physical decay / Yourself.And though Auden knew he was profoundlyindebted to Yeats in ways he could never repay, he then really drives the bootin. Poetry makes nothing happen,he declares, in what his friend Joseph Brodsky would later call the statement of the era.

This nervous stew of concerns the anxiety of influence, the anxiety of war, theanxiety of poetrys role is what turns a straightforward song of praise into an ir

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Shortly afterward, in January 1965, Brodsky learned through Western radio broadcasts of the death of T. S. Eliot. He had recently read Eliots poetry, and with Audens words trundlinginside him, he sat down and wrote a three-part elegy for Eliotaped from Audens structure.He wrote it by night because parasiteswere expected work the farm by day. Called Verses on the Death of T. S. Eliot,the fact that this poem was written at all is remarkable, more so, because as Czeslaw Milosz noted, no Western poet commemorated Eliots passing in verse. Since Eliot had died, conveniently, in January, Brodsky was able to repeat the wintry context of the original, even opening with: He died in January, the beginning of the year,a slackerversion that misses the crack of He disappeared in the dead of winter.On the whole, his poem is uneven, but parts of it are beautiful, ice-lit with sensuous images that mine the melancholy of an imagined, post-Christmas London: a city flinched in frost,shrinking behind black windowpanes,puddles stiffened into ice.Havinscaped this detritus, Eliot has become a star in a vast and hidden room,but moretouching than this rather clichd cosmic analogy of transcendence is the fragile beauty of: He latched his door on the thin chain of years.

The use of thintransforms the line, giving it a pathetic, brittle humanity. It evokes the image of an old man, fastidious to the end, padding downstairs to chainhis door against death, against the eternal footman waiting patiently with hiscoat and snicker: its time.

In 1973, Auden died of a heart attack in a hotel room in Vienna after a poetry reading. Sadly for this tough old treewho had written with such exquisite feeling

about love, the last years were lonely, alcoholic ones, his lifelong companion,Chester Kallman, mostly away in Athens, occupied with younger lovers. Auden wasburied in the Austrian village of Kirchstetten where he owned a cottage, and a couplet from the Yeats elegy was inscribed on the tombstone. (In the prison of his days, / Teach the free man how to praise.) While it does seem odd to appropriate words written for another poet, the inscription captured the quintessence ofAudens philosophy of the role of the poet in society. To the end, he held on to the conviction that though poetry was utterly useless in a practical way and madenothing happen (all the verse I wrote in the 30s did not save a single Jew, he often said), poets were the ultimate custodians of language, its sentinels against corruption, and thus served a higher calling. Kirchstetten, incidentally, waswhere Brodsky first met Auden, a stocky, heavily perspiring man in a red shirt and broad suspenders,and the Russian would no doubt have wholeheartedly approved o

f the inscription.

There is a metrical kinship, too, between Audens and Yeatss epitaphs, since Audenmodeled the last part of his elegy on Yeatss poem Under Ben Bulbenwhose closing lnes make up Yeatss epitaph:

Cast a cold eyeOn life, on death.Horseman, pass by!

For Brodsky, the death of Auden was a real blow. Auden had been instrumental inhelping him get to America after he was expelled by the Soviet Union, and had shown him many acts of kindness. The two men knew each other for less than a year

but had become friends. So, on the 10th anniversary of Audens death, Brodsky requested bamboozled, actually his friend Derek Walcott to write up something for amemorial service that he organized at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. Acutely aware of how much Auden had meant to Brodsky as friend andliterary hero, Walcott knew that to be chosen by him to do justice to Audens memory was a tremendous burden,as he told William Baer. And a tremendous honor.

In a courteous gesture that enfolded both Auden and Brodsky, he too chose, as amodel, Audens tribute to Yeats. Before an assemblage of friends and poets Walcottread out his Eulogy for W. H. Audenfrom the high pulpit of the Gothic cathedral.

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In the memorable words of the Walcott scholar Robert D. Hamner:

What could have been a greater study in contrasts a powerfully knit black poet from the Caribbean declaiming lines to honor the whey-faced and rumpled don of English-language letters? And what could have been more appropriate?

Walcotts tribute opened on a light affectionate note with a prosodic lilt and diction that mimicked Audens with comic exactness. Auden, he said, would have cringed at all the memorial flummery:

Assuredly, that runnelled face,is wincing deeply, and must loatheour solemn rubbishfrown on this canonizing farceas self-enhancing, in lines bothdevout and snobbish.

Walcotts personal interaction with that runnelled facewas limited to a single nod a single gracious nod outside an elevator, but his relationship with its poetrywas an old and loving one. His elegy is enriched with allusions to Audens poems,notably the wonderful In Praise of Limestone,and he does not shy away from enlisting the centurys brutal political crimes that had so tormented Auden:

Refugees

crammed in your lines, the doomed cattle-carshurtling like stanzas into guilty echoes.

He closed on a high seraphicnote with the stately Arthurian image of a barge caked with rust recalling the ash-stained, crumpled, shambling, slippered ruin of Auden making its way down the East River. But the most touching element that he inserted was his own memory of the elation and confusion of discovering Auden as achild in the Caribbean caught between histories and cultures:

in treachery or in unionDespite an Empires wrong,

I made my first communion,

there, with the English tongue.

It was such dispossessionthat made possession joy,when, strict as Psalm and Lesson,

I learnt your poetry.

Thirteen years later, in 1996, another memorial service, attended by hundreds ofmourners, was held in the same soaring Manhattan cathedral. This time it was for Brodsky. Although Brodsky was Jewish, the cathedral was a perfect venue for a

craftsman whose poems, said his friend Walcott, are designed like cathedral interiors, the font, the arches, the whole thing the whole concept of the poem as cathedral.

In an uncanny coincidence, Brodsky had died on the same date as Yeats, January 28. He was only 55. This date had had such a powerful impact on his life, poetically, that it seemed almost inevitable that he would, at some point, be honored by a reprisal of the elegy that had hit him with such transformative force, on afreezing swampy farm in Arkhangelsk all those years ago. And indeed he was. In atwinkling hip piece of verse called Audenesquethat had the ironic and buoyant in

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flections of the East Village, his friend Seamus Heaney wrote:

Joseph, yes, you know the beat.Wystan Audens metric feetMarched to it, unstressed and stressed,Laying William Yeats to rest.

Therefore, Joseph, on this day,Yeatss anniversary,(Double-crossed and death-marched date,January twenty-eight),

This was the third avatar of Audens poem and by far the most personal: after all,Auden barely knew Yeats, Brodsky had never met Eliot, and Walcott had only barely met Auden. But Heaney and Brodsky were mates. They had first met in London in1972 (this time, in another charming if irrelevant coincidence, it was Brodskywho was wearing a red shirt), visited each others homes in New York and Dublin, and traveled together to Finland; Heaney had translated Brodsky into English, andtheir friendship had, in his words, fortified poetry.The verses are warmed through with an accrual of memories, and although Heaney determinedly keeps the moodlight by making irreverent jokes about Brodskys impresario ways and bad habits (Everything against the grain, / Drinking, smoking like a train), his admiration for his friends intellect and values, and his grief at this very personal loss shine through:

Ice of Archangelic strength,Ice of this hard two-faced month,Ice like Dantes in deep hellMakes your heart a frozen well.

Pepper vodka you producedOnce in Western MassachusettsWith the reading due to startWarmed my spirits and my heart

But no vodka, cold or hot,Aquavit or uisquebaugh,

Brings the blood back to your cheeksOr the colour to your jokes, [...]

Archangelicrefers to Arkhangelsk, where Brodsky was exiled to hard labor. Heaneyends by urging his sociable friend to join the fellowship of poets who have gone before him. Auden had famously said, Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead,and so Seamus tells Joseph:

Do again what Auden saidGood poets do: bite, break their bread.

(Among the many fascinating aspects to this conversation is the way Kafka slipsthrough it. When Auden is mourning the state of Europe and urging the poet to us

e his gift to break through the seas of pitythat lie locked and frozen in each eye,he was no doubt invoking those famous words of Kafka, whom he greatly admired: Abook must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.Heaney, too, was almost certainly alluding to both Kafka and Auden when he compared death to an Ice no axe orbook will break.Iceis repeated four times, and each repetition serves to reinforce the rigor mortis in your breast.Brodsky would have been delighted at Kafkas presence he learnt Polish in order to read Kafka and Camus in translation, because Polish magazines were freely available in the USSR. And since he had overnight metamorphosed from human being to parasite, he was a nonfictional Gregor Samsa.)

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Finally, when Heaney died last year, and his body was lowered into the ground ofhis beloved County Derry, more than one tearful devotee recalled that most stately and sonorous quartet from Audens Yeats elegy, in which Heaneys name could so easily, and worthily, replace Yeatss to read:

Earth, receive an honored guest;Seamus Heaney is laid to rest:Let the Irish vessel lieEmptied of its poetry.

Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry,wrote Auden about Yeats, and how fully the sentiment applies to Heaney, who lived through the Troubles of Northern Ireland and never let anyone forget that his passport was green. Fitting, too, that an elegiac cycle that started out as a tribute to an Irishman should end with another Irishman.

And so there you have it: Yeats, Auden, Brodsky, Eliot, Walcott, and Heaney. Each a cultural giant in his own right; four migr poets; all winners of the Nobel Prize except, ironically enough, for Auden himself; all bound by this poem into a breaking of bread that embraces the traditions of Ireland, England, America, Russia, and the Caribbean. That is without including Milton, Blake, Donne, Horace, Kafka, and innumerable other legends whose works shaped these verses. Again, Aude

n wrote in that great elegy:

The words of a dead manAre modified in the guts of the living.

Brodskys lifelong admiration of Auden is central to this chain. By impulsively writing that tribute for Eliot in 1965, he unintentionally linked Yeats, Eliot, and Auden each considered heir to the other and it was his friendship with Walcottand Heaney that made them write their Auden-inflected tributes. Brodsky calledAuden the greatest English poet of the 20th century how strange and wonderful that the foundation of that friendship should be a chance reading among chickens.