Death

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1933

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

Action & Agency

The first appearance of agency in Yeats’s poem is in the first line. Notably, it is not an animal or man who is acting, but the “dread [and] hope,” which do not “attend” to the dying animal (Line 1). Though it is worded such that neither “dread nor hope” actually act, the syntax shows they are the subjects which act upon the object of the “animal” (Line 2). This is important because, along with the animal’s mortality being introduced as a grammatical modifying quality (“a dying animal [emphasis added]”), no sense of action or agency is attributed to the animal in question. Instead, the animal is grammatically completely passive, it lacks will in addition to its lack of emotion.

The man introduced in the second couplet, however, is given quite a bit of agency. Instead of “dying,” he actively “awaits his end” (Line 3). Instead of either being or not being attended to by his emotions, he is in a state of actively “Dreading and hoping all” (Line 4). The chiastic structure (words or phrases repeated in reverse order) of the first four lines makes any variation between the animal and the man stand out very clearly in the midst of repetition. While each is dying and has some relation to dread and hope, the syntax and diction of the lines strongly emphasizes the active agency of the man and the passivity of the animal.

The wording of the following lines further emphasizes the active will of their subject, in this case the “great man” (Line 7). The verbs tend to be active (“Casts,” “knows,” “created”) and man tends to be the subject, not object (Lines 9, 11, 12). Finally, even man’s ultimate relation to death emphasizes man’s agency. For the poem, death does not happen to people—instead, people have “created death” (Line 12). In fact, it is the great man’s active understanding (“He knows” [Line 11]) of this that allows him to actively reject the human reaction (that is, an action infused with the secondary passivity of response) of “Dreading and hoping all” (Line 4). While the poem portrays animals as passive objects to be acted upon, and the average person as active but still reactive, the great man “in his pride” (Line 7) embodies the ultimate active agency. His self-possession and knowledge allow him to actively decide his state of being, even in the face of mortality.

Consciousness & Knowledge

Yeats’s poem contrasts the experiences of a few characters (i.e., an animal, man, a great man) with death. Though the poem is organized to say something about death through these presentations, it is crucial to note the experiences of each character with death are defined by their knowledge. The “dying animal” (Line 2) is attended by neither “dread nor hope” (Line 1) because it doesn’t know to dread or hope. The animal lacks consciousness and, so, it lacks consciousness of death. Animals are not aware of their mortality in the same way as humans, and their experience of death is defined by this lack of consciousness, according to the poem.

Human beings, on the other hand, cannot stop being aware of their mortality. The man in the poem is “Dreading and hoping all” (Line 4) because he is fully conscious of his end. Yeats even writes that he “awaits his end” (Line 3), spinning out his anxieties and hopes as a direct result of his self-awareness and awareness of the inevitable end of self.

The great man, however, “knows death” (Line 11), and he knows that death is something “Man has created” (Line 12). It is this additional knowledge that allows him to interact with mortality differently. According to the poem, this extra knowledge possessed by the great man changes the very nature of death for him. After all, if death is a creation of man, then a consciousness of its artificiality allows for it to become a fundamentally different phenomenon to those who possess it.

Mortality & Power

Death and mortality are essential themes of the poem. Aside from the straightforward title, “Death,” there is no image in the poem that does not directly relate to mortality. The animal is “dying” (Line 2), the man awaits “his end” (Line 3), a great man in the face of his mortality confronts other men who are “murderous” (Line 8). The poem concerns itself with dying characters and with the nature of death itself.

However, its thematic preoccupation with death is often presented in terms of power. The passively dying animal is without recourse, and the continued death and rebirth of a “man await[ing] his end” (Line 3) is implicitly a result of the powers of society and experience acting upon him. The great man’s ability to approach death differently is a result of knowledge, but he wields that knowledge like power. He “confront[s]” adversaries (Line 8), who are themselves attempting to exert power over him. The great man uses his power to cast “derision upon” (Line 9) the replacement of one breath with another using language almost more suited to a judge or ruler. The ability to interact with one's own death and death in general is dependent upon possessing knowledge. Crucially, however, that knowledge requires an active wielding of it—it requires the implementation of power—in order to effectively impact the experience of death.