An elegy is a poem which mourns the end of a life, and lays out the particulars and characteristics of a particular loss.

The traditional elegy resembles the plaza monument in how it sets out a community's grief at the loss of a figure held in common. Elegies invoke the funerary customs and ritual of the society in which this death happens, or in the community's expression of loss. In some ways, the power of the elegy resembles the power of collective memory and community.

I think the elegy, more than any other form, creates the possessive plural pronoun — the Our— in relation to its subject. This is our hero who died; we are now defined as part of his lineage; our lives are interpreted in relation to his actions. 

As Eavan Boland and Mark Strand have written, "the best elegies will always be sites of struggle between custom and decorum on one hand, and private feeling on the other." One sees this in W. H. Auden's elegy, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," where the speaker alternates between intimacy and conventional decorum. You can almost track this shift from section to section.

Section 1, for example, creates a sense of place carved out by loss:

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Auden highlights this last moment of being, the final instance of inhabiting the known selfhood, and the shift which occurs is memorial, which is to say, now his admirers will define him. 

I thought of the poetics of dementia, and the particular loss enacted by Alzheimers; the one who loves the Alzheimer's patient seems to hover at the doorway of this last moment— the last moment in which they are themselves in the slow erosion of selfhood. 

The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

Auden loops back to Yeats, or to the body on bed who became his admirers. And Auden is one of these admirers who carries Yeats into the future. 

Section II changes pace, and performs a sort of reversal. Unlike the other sections, this one exists in a single stanza:

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.

Section III tightens the form, hewing to meticulous rhyme schemes, gesturing towards a song-like structure which resembles decorum, or conventions for mourning a public figure. Even the beginning seems to clear its throat; the first quatrain arranges itself behind the podium:

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

The mournful statement has been made, and this final section resembles a traditional funeral eulogy. What fascinates me in this final section is how Auden puts on his Sunday best (in the first section, he's wearing jeans and golf shirt); he smooths his tie and straightens his cuff-lengths in six tidy, isometric quatrains. 

This tidy sombreness is the marble from which monuments are made.

Here are the final two quatrains in Auden's poem:

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.

End-rhymes also add to the monumental texture of Auden’s poem. One of the decisions a poet makes involves the poem’s relation to statues, to shadows, to the monumental tradition invoked by form. And each poem asks something different of the poet. At our best, we are attuned to this. At our worst, we are human.