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Wystan Hugh AudenA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
The image of the public statues “disfigured” (Line 3) by the snow symbolizes what may happen to great men and women after their deaths. They may be appreciated by their fellow citizens—hence the commemoration in the form of a statue—but they have also relinquished control of their work and thus their legacy, which must now be interpreted and decided on by others. Several times in the elegy, this is shown to apply to Yeats, who has just spent “his last afternoon as himself” (Line 12). Judgment may not always be kind either, as the word “disfigured” suggests. Yeats will be “punished” because his work may now be assessed “under a foreign code of conscience” (Line 21)—that is, a different set of values, which may distort the dead poet’s idea of his purpose and/or his achievement.
In Section 1, several descriptions of natural phenomena and man-made structures represent Yeats’s life and ideas. “The peasant river” (Line 9) symbolizes Yeats’s interest in the Irish peasantry and Irish folklore, as evidence in his 1888 book, Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry.
The “fashionable quays” (Line 9) symbolize the life of the aristocracy, which Yeats also savored. He became a friend of the wealthy dramatist Lady Augusta Gregory (1852-1932), staying for long periods at Coole Park, her estate in County Galway that became the center of the Irish Literary Revival.