Earth, receive an honored guest;
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

These lines come from W. H. Auden’s elegy for W. B. Yeats, written shortly after Yeats’s death in January 1939. Auden, an English poet then living in the United States, composed the poem as both a public memorial and a meditation on what survives of a poet after death. The quoted stanza imagines a formal burial address to the earth, treating Yeats as an “honored guest,” while also stressing the physical finality of death: the “Irish vessel” (Yeats’s body, and by extension the national figure he represented) is now “emptied of its poetry.”

Auden juxtaposes ceremonial praise with a stark, almost impersonal image of the corpse as a “vessel” now drained of the animating force of art. The stanza insists on the separation between the poet’s mortal remains and the continuing life of the poems: the body returns to earth, but the work moves into the world’s ongoing “mouth” and memory. Calling Yeats an “Irish vessel” also acknowledges how Yeats had been made to carry national and cultural meanings; death empties that symbolic container, leaving the poetry to circulate independently. The tone is both reverent and unsentimental, characteristic of Auden’s refusal of purely consolatory elegy.