A way of happening

W.B. Yeats died on January 28, 1939, and W.H. Auden---who had already written, for example, Funeral Blues (Stop all the clocks ...)---wrote the three-part elegy In Memory of W.B. Yeats.  I hardly ever like poems about poetry, but this poem is an exception.  I'm reading the short and stunning second part:

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself.  Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on 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.

Notice the humanizing silly like us.

The word gift, when you first read it in the opening line, would probably be understood in the sense of talent, and it is only later that you figure out that its primary meaning is the deceased poet's body of work (which was his gift to the world, etc.), but---because you've already thought of it---the other reading still remains in your mind as a secondary meaning.

And then you come to survived, the key word, which reappears (it survives) in the middle and the end to mark the poem's remarkable statement about poetry:  That poetry makes nothing happen, but that it remains A way of happening.

And, in between, poetry is a river that starts In the valley of its making (writing a poem is a valley) and flows on south (why south?)/From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,/Raw towns that we believe and die in (note the effortless plurivalent grammar here---the busy griefs are Raw towns that:  a. we believe and we die in, and b. we believe in and we die in ...  and, in contrast to us that die in the Raw towns of the busy griefs, the river of poetry flows on and survives) to---a place powerful enough to end both a river and a poem---a mouth.

Here, without commentary, is the elegy's third (and final) part, which has more about poetry:

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

Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique,

Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at their feet.

Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

Auden later edited out the harsh stanzas 2 through 4 of this part (from Time that is intolerant to Pardons him for writing well).