Death

W. B. Yeats begins his poem with a negative description. Instead of the first line setting up the beginnings of an image or setting, the reader is given only a kind of reverse description: neither “dread nor hope attend” (Line 1). Though the line does provide its readers with a verb, without the subject of the clause it is unclear to whom or what dread and hope do not “attend” (Line 1). Though the line is short and quickly supplies a subject and image by the conclusion of the following line, it accomplishes a few important effects by positioning itself in terms of lack. First, following the poem’s stark and blunt title, “Death,” the negation of the first line immediately creates a mood of death and its emptiness. Second, this description by means of negation (especially given the gravitas already naturally infusing its one-word title) lends the poem a tone of religious importance. The method of describing a big metaphysical idea by means of saying what it is not is a traditional one within Christian theology known as negative theology (or apophatic theology). To begin such a short poem—titled with such a heavy word—with only apophatic description already creates a sense of solemnity and mysticism, like a priest’s funereal sermon.

To what, then, is this negative description applied? Not God, with whom apophatic theology is generally concerned, but instead something much less grand: “A dying animal” (Line 2). The solemn void introduced in the poem’s title and first line is grounded in the starkly real, here. Instead of maintaining the mysticism of short lines filled with only the simple but profound ideas (“Death,” “dread,” “hope”), Yeats introduces the grotesque and unavoidable reality of expiring animals, of failing flesh to his reflection on death.

If dread and hope do not play any part in an animal’s experience of death, it begs the question: What or whom do they attend? The poet introduces this contrasting experience immediately, juxtaposing a dying animal with a “man await[ing] his end” (Line 3). The repetition of the opening article “A,” especially in a poem with such short lines, emphasizes the comparison between the two subjects. While the comparison would have been even more obvious if Line 3 instead began “A dying man,” reproducing exactly the opening of “A dying animal” (Line 2), the variation accomplishes more than just metrical or rhyming effects. While both the man and the animal in these lines are dying, it is only the animal that is described as such. The animal is modified by the present participle “dying” (in this case, a verb ending in “-ing” used as an adjective), where it is something which possesses the quality of “dying.” On the other hand, the man actively “awaits” death. Unlike the animal, the man is not described as a thing which matter-of-factly is “dying,” but rather as a subject which willfully chooses to wait not just for the abstract generality “death,” but for “his [own, particular] end” (Line 3).

The contrast of man with animal by means of mirroring continues in the fourth line, which echoes the first. As opposed to the animal, the man waits for death “Dreading and hoping” (Line 4). While the dread and hope which did not concern the dying animal were represented as not “attend[ing]” it (Line 1), these emotions are related not to the dying man himself but directed outward by him to “all” (Lines 4). Man here is separated from his death, from his emotion, and from their objects more than the intrinsically self-unified animal.

The following couplet continues to use the repetition which has so far characterized the poem, though this time in a more direct way. The two lines echo each other, differing only in their nearly opposite endings. The dying man has “died” and “rose again” “Many times” (Lines 5-6). Of course, the poem is not here discussing literal, supernatural deaths and resurrections. Instead, the reader is forced to consider the word “death” in a more expanded and metaphorical sense. This not only sets up the poem’s rhetorical direction moving forward, but also complicates the death already presented to the reader in the first quatrain.

Some scholars consider these lines to be an allusion to Shakespeare, echoing the titular ruler’s proclamation in Julius Caesar, “Cowards die many times before their deaths; / The valiant never taste of death but once” (II, ii, 32-3) (Marken, Ronald. “Yeats’s ‘Death’: A Reading.” Irish University Review, vol. 10, no. 2, Edinburgh University Press, 1980, pp. 244–50). This process of repeated deaths and rebirths may allude to the aforementioned experience of the Shakespearian “coward.” Alternatively, it may simply refer to the experience of being a conscious human being—experiencing endings and “deaths” as well as new beginnings or “rebirths.” Whatever the case, the man who dreads and hopes “all” is now contrasted with the way someone else faces their mortality: Yeats’s “great man” (Line 7).

This “great man” is introduced in a line which contains nothing but himself and “his pride,” highlighting his self-sufficiency (Line 7). In the following line he very actively “Confront[s]” his adversary, here “murderous men” (Line 8). His reaction, perhaps predictably, is not fear or “dread,” but instead to “Cast[...] derision upon” (Line 9) this threat. The great man is juxtaposed both with the dread and hope of the average dying man as well as with the unthinking dying animal. Instead, he actively “Casts” (Line 9) his lack of respect on his own mortality.

However, it is not specifically the murderous men which the great man derides, but rather “Supersession of breath” (Line 10). To supersede is to supplant or replace, so it is the succession of breath by some other thing (either a next breath or the silence of death) that the great man scoffs while facing his own possible end at the hands of murderous men. This is important because the great man not only doesn’t dread death, he doesn’t even scoff at it per se but at the more bodily and grounded replacement of one breath by another (or by silence). Death as such is outside the scope of the great man’s emotional reactions to events not because he doesn’t understand it, but because he does—because “he knows death to the bone” (Line 11).

The knowledge of death’s true nature works as a remedy to the average person's “Dreading and hoping all” (Line 4) that pertains to mortality. The nature of death which the great man understands is, bluntly, that “Man has created death” (Line 12). Yeats presents death here as a kind of socio-cultural or psychological construction. The word “death” refers to a concept (full of hope and dread, rife with fear and anxiety) that goes beyond the simple expiration of a living body. Instead, it also contains the emotional significances and social meanings that motivate and distress people as they live their lives, “Dreading” their own endings and “hoping” for significance beyond them (Line 4).

The great man’s understanding of death is almost more akin to the dying animal’s than the average man’s. He does not concern himself with dread or hope, he simply exists “in his pride” (Line 7), confronting threats and understanding “to the bone” (Line 11) that the death which awaits him is a product of the very thing he is: a human being.