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 johnlyon

Yourself; mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

NowIreland has her madness and her weather still,

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives

In the valley of its saying where executives

Would never want to tamper; it flows south

From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,

Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,

A way of happening, a mouth.^14

Figuratively we are in a landscape in which poetry itself is imagined as a river
which ‘flows south’, issuing in ‘a mouth’. (The mouth, however, also relates back
to the ‘mouth of the dying day’ of Yeats’s death and to the ‘mourning tongues’
reciting his poems in the first section of the elegy.) There is an escapism here,
not only in the metaphor of travelling across anAmericanlandscape—‘ranches’,
‘Rawtowns’—which leaves Ireland and Europe behind, but also a loosening of
meaning. Hence the American feminist poet Adrienne Rich, engaged in a battle
of her own and intent on loosening the patriarchy’s grip on language, and on the
word ‘lonely’ in particular, was responding profoundly to the way in which Auden’s
(nonetheless anti-political) poem works when she borrowed Auden’s landscape
and cadence:

You want to ask, am I lonely?

Well, of course, lonely

as a woman driving across country

day after day, leaving behind

mile after mile

little towns she might have stopped

andlivedanddiedin,lonely

If I’m lonely

it must be the loneliness

of waking first...^15

Moreover, in Auden we arrive finally and starkly at ‘a mouth’: poetry does not issue
fromamouthbutratherina mouth. Retrospectively, literature has modified this
final phrase rather cruelly in the ‘guts of the living’, since the most famous mouth
in literature is now the incessant babble of ‘Mouth’ in Beckett’sNot I. Hamlet, too,
has something to say about the politics of making mouths, since it was in such
terms that he simultaneously admired thewarring Fortinbras and wondered at his
folly and presumption:

Witness this army of such mass and charge,

Led by a delicate and tender prince,

Whose spirit, with divine ambition puff’d,

(^14) Auden, ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, 242.
(^15) Adrienne Rich, ‘Song’, inDiving into the Wreck: Poems 1971–1972(New York: Norton, 1973), 20.