Yeats Summer School: Death much occupied the mind of WB Yeats, Terence Brown, professor of Anglo-Irish literature at Trinity College, Dublin, told the international summer school in honour of the poet in Sligo yesterday.
Prof Brown said that as summer turned to autumn in 1938, Yeats was much possessed of death and the dead.
"In 1927, he had told Dorothy Shakespear that the dead along with sex were the only things that could hold 'the least interest for the serious and the studious mind'.
"Since that date, the year in which the assassination of Kevin O'Higgins had once more brought home to Yeats the horror of life cut short by violence, which earlier the executions of 1916 had enforced upon him, these subjects had indeed preoccupied him as he recorded in his verse and prose the deaths of friends and familiar enemies," Prof Brown said.
He added that as the year turned in 1938, death and the dead became "obdurately insistent" companions of a poet who sensed that the tide of his own turbulent life was inexorably on the wane.
On August 10th, his play Purgatory, with its ghosts and its murder, appeared on the stage of the Abbey Theatre. Twelve days later, Yeats wrote to his friend and lover of a few years before that he was arranging his burial place, "a little remote country churchyard in Sligo".
Prof Brown said that another letter, probably written in September, had revealed that the poet had been discussing with his sister, Lily, that he had "described his own burial and tombstone in a poem".
In October, Yeats had learned of the sudden death of Olivia Shakespear, "his first lover and long-time friend".
Prof Brown said it was clear Séamus Heaney shared the Yeatsian regard for "death as dignification".
Heaney, he said, had taken issue with "one of the most desolate poems written in English on the subject of individual mortality, Philip Larkin's Aubade".
The title of the poem had a terrible irony, he added, given that an aubade was a poem in which a lover, after a night of love, greeted a new dawn.
In Larkin's poem, the poet wakes in "soundless dark" to await the light, overwhelmed by a crushing awareness of death as merely a meaningless end to life, an end so radically pointless as to be beyond "dignification".
Prof Brown read: "And so it stays just on the edge of vision/A small unfocused blur, a standing chill/ That slows each impulse down to indecision/Most things may never happen: this one will/And realisation of it rages out/In furnace-fear when we are caught without/People or drink."
Heaney, he said, had written it would be hard to think of a poem more opposed to the life-enhancing symbolism of the Christ-child in the Christmas crib.
"That is to say that the tenor of Larkin's poem is to deny the consolatory power of Christianity in face of our knowledge of our own mortality, for that Christmas crib leads not only to crucifixion but a resurrection, in the telling of the tale," Prof Brown added.