Death - a poem by W B Yeats. 157 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

Death - a poem by W B Yeats.

‘Death’ was written in 1929 and included in Yeats’s 1933 volume The Winding Stair and Other Poems. Yeats examines human attitudes to death, contrasting them with an animal’s ignorance of its own mortality. He says that humans live as if there is no end. He focuses on the wrong behaviour of humans which lead them to think of their immortality - pride, ego, violence, superiority, self worship etc



'Nor dread nor hope attend

A dying animal;

A man awaits his end

Dreading and hoping all;

Many times he died,

Many times rose again,

A great man in his pride.'

The poem, then, suggests an ambivalence: when we breathe our last breath on this earth, do we merely replace one kind of existence with another? What happens to us when we die?

Illustration of A Black Tower, Ireland. W. B. Yeats’ final poem, ‘The Black Tower’, is dated one week before his death on the 28th January 1939.