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

Form & Meter

Yeats’s short poem consists of only 12 lines. Although it doesn’t conform to a pre-existing traditional verse form (like a sonnet or villanelle), it does follow definite metrical constraints. Each of the poem’s lines is written in iambic trimeter, combining three sets of iambs (that is, an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable) for a total of six syllables per line.

Iambic is generally considered the most “natural” sounding meters in English, though limiting his line to three feet (a poetic foot is a unit of meter; here most feet are iambs) gives Yeats’s poem a more serious tone. The shorter lines emphasize each individual word and individual line meaning, as they further remove the poem from “natural” speech. This removal also continually emphasizes the solemnity of the poem by relegating it more to the category of “poetic” speech.

Rhyme

Though published in 1933, a time in which poetry was moving further away from traditional forms, metrical constraints, and foregrounded rhyme, Yeats’s short poem makes heavy use of end rhyme (that is, the rhyming of the last words in poetic lines) in addition to its traditional meter. The rhyming pattern is fairly straightforward, with the poem organizing itself into end rhyme-repeated quatrains in the following pattern, ABABCDCDEFEF. The tight, interwoven pattern of rhyming—especially when paired with the abbreviated length of the lines—makes the sounds of the rhyme unignorable.

Yeats uses a variety of syntactic sentence structures and a mix of both parsed lines (poetic lines which break with the syntax) and annotated lines (poetic lines which break against their syntax) to avoid an overly sing-song sound to “Death.” However, the choice to use strong end rhymes and short lines still creates an old fashioned, musical-sounding poem—though perhaps music with the gravitas of a funeral hymn.

Repetition (Chiasmus & Anaphora)

In such a short poem, one with only 12 short lines written in trimeter, Yeats’s poetic tools are limited. The poet uses various kinds of repetition to capitalize on his limited space and maximize the impact of the poem’s argument. The general repetition and mirroring in the first four lines has already been noted, but the memorability of this quatrain is due in no small part to the specific type of repetition employed by Yeats. The structure used is called chiasmus, a form of literary and rhetorical parallelism where something is repeated or mirrored in reverse order. In this case, the first line (“Nor dread nor hope attend”) is echoed by the last line (“Dreading and hoping all”), while the second and third lines echo each other in turn. The quatrain resembles a poetic sandwich, with the “dying animal” and “man await[ing] his end” (Lines 2-3) in the middle, contained by the bread of dread and hope.

The following couplet continues to use repetition, but it resets the structure of the poem by using a different kind of literary strategy. Specifically, these lines make use of anaphora, or the direct repetition of opening words and phrases. The “Many times [...] / Many times” (Lines 5-6) of this couplet lend the poem the solemnity that comes with the cadence of a chant. This repetition is reflected in the conclusion of the poem, which gains its snappy memorability in part from its more indirect (but still audible) repetition. Especially in a poem with such short lines, the repeated word “death” sticks out. “He knows death” (Line 11) is mimicked not only in the vowel sounds of “created,” but in the ending of its following line, “Man has created death” (Line 12). Yeats’s use of repetition provides structure, memorability, and a tone of gravitas to his short poem on such a heavy subject.