Death

Time, the passage of time, and the ways in which we interact with time serve as a backdrop for the primary thematic concerns of the poem. From the very first line, time is a concern. Yeats’s choice of the verb “attend” (Line 1) introduces time as a poetic player. The personification of dread and hope as “attending” to a dying animal (or, rather, not attending) evokes an image of servants or medical professionals waiting on a patron or patient. To attend is to devote periods of time to intermittent action, to literally “wait on” someone, to tend to their needs as they arise. Time already appears in this opening couplet because neither “hope nor dread” (Line 1) pay attention (or, perhaps, give the time of day) to an animal in the process of death. Even death is portrayed as a process here, with the descriptor “dying” attributing the process of death over time as a quality of the “animal” (Line 2).

The man in the next couplet relates to death in terms of “await[ing] his end” (Line 3). Yeats again positions the two elements of the couplet—the thing dying and its death—temporally. Time is the means by which the man and death interact; the man is “Dreading and hoping all” (Line 4) as he waits for death. In this way, the man experiences dying and rising again “Many times” over (Line 5-6). Though this couplet is the first time the word “time” itself is used in the poem, it is not its first (or last) appearance. After the more intimate, immediate images of a single animal or man relating to their own respective deaths, the “Many times” couplet gives a sense of zooming out, of transitioning from a moment or scene to a series of repeating scenes over a long time span. Even though the couplet is a metaphorical description of the experience of one person, it reminds the reader of the huge scale of the whole history of life and death, of generations of animals and people being born and dying. This large scope contributes even more gravity to an already solemn poem, reminding the reader of the cosmic and existential importance of mortality.

Yeats continues to modulate the passage of time in the poem, using its passage as a motif. A “great man” (Line 7) “Confronting murderous men” (Line 8) zooms the poem back in to a single moment, the immediacy of which is emphasized by the tension of the threat of violence. Yeats cleverly expands the time he has compressed from within the image when the man derides the “Supersession of breath” (Line 10). The replacement of one breath with the next echoes the zoomed-out time of the “Many” deaths and rebirths of Lines 5-6. Here, time is present once again, showing a wide expanse where the cycle of life and breath marches ever forward.

Part of the power of the poem’s concluding couplet is the inherent emphasis it gains from abruptly halting the expanse of time to a single moment of declaration. Instead of action taking place, as with the great man who “Casts derision upon” (Line 9) his enemies or the process of a man “await[ing] his end” (Line 3), the final couplet completely halts any sense of process or scene. Any idea of succession is boiled down to a single moment’s understanding: “Man has created death” (Line 12). Aside from obviously evoking skeletons, death, and decay, knowing “death to the bone [emphasis added]” (Line 11) also furthers the temporal singularity of the poem. Bones are silent, still, solid, and at the center of things—death is known all the way to the bone, to its core. The singular, still centrality of the final couplet emphasizes it against a poem of process, where time speeds up and slows down, but never halts. That is, time only halts at the end of the poem and, as the poem itself performs for its readers, at the end of life.