Verses on the Death of T. S. Eliot by Joseph Brodsky

First published: 1970, as “Stikhi na smert’ T. S. Eliota,” in Ostanovka v pustyne; English translation collected in Selected Poems, 1973

Type of poem: Elegy

The Poem

“Verses on the Death of T. S. Eliot” is a poem in three parts modeled on W. H. Auden’s 1939 elegy “In Memory of W. B. Yeats.” The classic elegy of Western tradition is a meditation on death, be it the death of a particular person or death as the inevitable end of all things mortal. At the same time, it “finds consolation in the contemplation of some permanent principle” (Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 1974). Joseph Brodsky’s elegy, like Auden’s, mourns the death of a poet; unlike Auden’s, it takes considerable comfort—even exults—in the power of memory and poetry.

Thomas Stearns Eliot, American expatriate and British subject, died in England on January 4, 1965. Brodsky, Soviet citizen in exile in Russia’s far north, learned of the elder poet’s death a week or so after the fact. Part 1 begins with the flat statement of when and where Eliot died: “at the start of the year, in January” in a city of streetlights, entryways, intersections, and doors inhabited by darkness, cold, and snow. The city seems concrete enough, a real and practical place haunted by eternal but practical concerns. The question of inheritance is raised, but, in a shift to another plane, Eliot’s heirs are the Muses, who can hardly complain that he has left them bankrupt. Poetry may be orphaned, “yet it breeds within the glass/ of lonely days,” echoing like Narcissus’s lovesick nymph and visible in the rhythm of time and the “rhyme of years.” Death takes the singer, not the song; it has no need for the fields or seas or well-wrought lines in a poem. Eliot the Anglican convert may have managed to live through Christmas into the beginning of the new year, but the new year itself marks the end of the old year and its holiday; the calendar rhythm of the year, like the rhythm of ocean waves, bears him away from his own high holiday. Time and tides rather than God pull him out to sea, leaving the rest of humanity on dry land.

Part 2 continues in the same meter and on the same vast scale of seas and continents. However, the realistic cityscape is replaced by a funeral tableau, a scene straight from a Greek or Roman bas-relief. Magi, prophets and priests of antiquity, are called in to hold the halo while two mournful female figures stand downcast on either side of the grave (that is, the ocean). They are America, where Eliot’s life began, and England, where it ended (in Russian, Amerika and Anglia, both feminine nouns). The final line of part 2 is a single sentence set apart that acts as a conclusion: “But each grave is the limit of the earth.” Part 3 shifts meter and rhyme scheme. The poet invokes the god Apollo to cast down his own wreath at Eliot’s feet as a marker of immortality in the mortal realm. The footsteps and songs will be remembered by the trees and the land, by wind, by every sheaf of grain. What he has left behind will be felt, invisibly but tangibly, in the same way that love is felt after the loved one disappears forever. Just as the body recalls touch, memory recalls words.

Forms and Devices

Brodsky’s initial and most obvious device is his choice of models: Auden’s poem on the death of Yeats. The poem is not a narrative, so the three parts are not chapters forming a beginning, middle, and end. Instead, they vary in formal structure and in tone, changing the stance of the person looking at this poet’s life and work. While Auden eschews rhyme and strict meter in the first two parts, Brodsky observes them. (The English translation, though more regular in meter than Auden’s poem, is not as traditional in form as Brodsky’s original version.) The formal likeness is greatest in part 3, in which the meter (trochaic tetrameter), regular rhyme scheme (abab), choice of stanza (quatrain), and use of repetition give the whole section both regular movement and finality.

Yet Brodsky’s poem is not an imitation; rather, it uses Auden’s reflection on a poet’s life, death, and art as a framework for a different sort of monument. For example, Auden’s three parts reflect stages in Yeats’s poetry, last to first: realistic, sober, and urban in his last years; ironic and emotional in the middle; Romantic, balladic, and folkloric in the beginning. Brodsky uses his divisions differently; they mark not progression but a shift in angle of vision that is linguistically expressed as style. Connecting links are arranged not in time but in space, using imagery often found in Eliot’s own work: bleak cities, landscapes, and seas. There are echoes of Eliot’s themes, especially the likeness of beginnings to endings and the connections between poetry and death that run through his Four Quartets (1943): “the end is the beginning,/ And the end and the beginning were always there/ Before the beginning and after the end./ And all is always now.” (“Burnt Norton”) and “Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,/ Every poem an epitaph” (“Little Giddings”). There are also allusions to other poems, including “The Coming of the Magi” and “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees.” Aside from allusions to Eliot himself, the poem contains classical pastoral imagery of wood and water as well as allusions to Narcissus and the lovelorn nymph Echo, Aeolus the wind, the Roman poet Horace, and finally, triumphantly, Apollo, god of poetry, patron of the arts. Through the classical allusions, imagery, and rhyme also come echoes of Russian poets Alexander Pushkin, Osip Mandelstam, and Anna Akhmatova.