The poet is dying, presumably, and is thinking back over his life's work. There's only himself in it, so he sets up a classic Wordsworthian 'Expostulation and Reply' plot with his own echo. This Yeats poem is famous for a certain line [bolded], and it was this line gave Auden the pivot upon which to turn the theme of his famous elegy, 'In Memory of W.B. Yeats':
Man. In a cleft that's christened Alt
Under broken stone I halt
At the bottom of a pit
That broad noon has never lit,
And shout a secret to the stone.
All that I have said and done,
Now that I am old and ill,
Turns into a question till
I lie awake night after night
And never get the answers right.
Did that play of mine send out
Certain men the English shot?
Did words of mine put too great strain
On that woman's reeling brain?
Could my spoken words have checked
That whereby a house lay wrecked?
And all seems evil until I
Sleepless would lie down and die.
Echo. Lie down and die.
Of course the poet does eventually lie down and die. I love the ending of this poem: something feral intrudes on his thought, and distracts it, and that in itself is a kind of compelling reply, really, the only response to art, life --
Up there some hawk or owl has struck,
Dropping out of sky or rock,
A stricken rabbit is crying out,
And its cry distracts my thought.
What has always interested me about Yeats' poem was the sheer naivety of his arrogance to believe that a play or poem of his could influence or direct the course of history. I can't imagine a play or poem so captivating the heart of zealot that he'd be willing to take up arms and risk his life for its sake. Auden, as you know, had a good answer for Yeats. The second stanza of his elegy articulates beautifully my own position on the historical agency which poetry is not:
You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish 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.
Truly a stunning riposte, as well as a powerful aesthetic manifesto. And poetry does indeed make nothing happen, though it is itself a way of happening. And yet poets continue to 'carve in the smithy of their souls the consciousness of their people'. But, if poetry makes nothing happen, then literary criticism makes even less happen. I cannot imagine a sincere, authentic artist paying the blindest bit of regard to what any critic might have to say. Shelley overstated the effect the vituperative Edinburgh Review had on Keats, but he did that for dramatic effect. Keats knew what his purpose was and kept his eye firmly fixed on it. I suppose it comes down to second bests, really, and our wanting to leave our mark. The most classic case of all was Bruno Schulz's response to Witold Gombrowicz who had tried to lure him away from his art into answering his critics: Schulz answer was to preserve the dignity of his craft at all costs, be true to it at all costs. It got him killed on the street of the Lodz ghetto, but the Nazi bullet could not kill the sacred integrity of his art.
