Death

Nor dread nor hope attend
A dying animal;
A man awaits his end
Dreading and hoping all;
Many times he died,
Many times rose again…

In one of W B Yeats’s finest short poems, he compares man’s mindfulness that he will die with an animal being oblivious of death. An animal neither fears death nor hopes for life after death. But man consoles himself through religion that death will not be the end.

In ‘Julius Caesar’, Shakespeare writes on a similar alignment: ‘Cowards die many times before their deaths. The brave experience death only once.’ We ‘die’ in the course of our lives many times, through failure of nerve or failing to live in some other sense.

Yet we get another chance to make our lives good; as the poem refers next to:

A great man in his pride
Confronting murderous men
Casts derision upon
Supersession of breath,
He knows death to the bone -
Man has created death.

 

Yeats is not denying that men die. He is rejecting the notion that mortality is something we should dwell too much upon. An animal dies, just like a man; but an animal does not live its life governed by questions of what happens when it has died.

 

Sure, death will come to all one day…

Don’t let the fact take your life astray!

 

- Pravin K. Sabnis