Section V: The Advice to Young Artists

Irish Subjects and European Tradition

Section V opens with direct address: “Irish poets, learn your trade”. This is not mere technical instruction. Yeats is saying that poetry is a craft, something that must be learned, studied, practiced. It’s not inspiration alone; it’s skill. And this skill is particularly crucial for Irish poets, who have a specific heritage and responsibility.

He then lists his models: “Sing whatever is well made, / Scorn the sort now growing up / All out of shape from toe to top”. The “sort now growing up” refers to contemporary poets whom Yeats saw as technically incompetent, formally loose, and lacking the discipline of traditional craft. He’s contrasting these with “whatever is well made”, work that is technically accomplished, formally sound, disciplined. For Yeats, good art requires form, craft, mastery of traditional techniques.

Who the Models Are

Yeats names his models: “Sing the lords and ladies fair, / Sing a barley sheaf and beaker / Full of wine, sung by the Greek. / Sing whatever things have grace”. The reference is to classical poetry, to beauty objects, to elegance. But notice: he says “sing a barley sheaf”, not “sing your political message” or “sing Irish nationalism”. The content matters less than the form, the beauty, the craft.

“But leave the rest to the Lord” is a dismissal. Leave politics, history, social issues to others. The poet’s task is to make beautiful things, well-made things. This is a controversial stance (Yeats himself spent much of his life engaged with Irish politics) but here, in old age, he’s saying that poetry’s real purpose is formal and aesthetic.

On the Body and Physicality

He continues: “Take the finest thing we have got, / Make a two-handed engine your thought, / That though the years have crept upon us, / Still memory and imagination hold us”. Here Yeats is saying that the finest thing we have is our capacity for beauty, imagination, memory. Even as age takes the body, these remain. The “two-handed engine” (from Milton) is something powerful, something that works on multiple levels, something that holds.

The Final Instruction

The section concludes: “Rhythm and time got your feet upon the ground, / And therefore dance and sing whatever is most grand”. Music, rhythm, dance, song: these are the arts that align the body with beauty. They’re not mere entertainment. They’re ways of making the body accord with grace and beauty. “Whatever is most grand” captures Yeats’s final aesthetic judgment: aim high, make something magnificent, don’t settle for the ordinary.

Section VI: The Epitaph

The Command and the Authority

Section VI shifts tone entirely. It’s no longer advice but command, and it’s increasingly personal: “Under bare Ben Bulben’s head / In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid”. Yeats is writing his own epitaph. He’s specifying where he will be buried, Drumcliff, County Sligo, near the mountain of his childhood. This is not abstract or universal. It’s particular, rooted, Irish.

The move from “Yeats” to first person shows a distancing. He’s writing about himself as if already dead, looking at his own grave from outside time. This is extraordinary. The poet has transcended his living self and is observing his own death and burial.

What Matters in a Life

He continues: “An ancestor was rector there, / Long years ago; a church stands near, / By the road an old stone cross”. The genealogy is established. He has roots. His family had position and meaning in this place. His death is not isolated but part of a continuity, a family and community history. The church and the stone cross situate his grave in Irish Christian tradition.

The Final Judgment

Then comes the remarkable summary: “No marble, no conventional phrase; / On limestone quarried near the spot / By his command these words are cut: / ‘Cast a cold eye / On life, on death. / Horseman, pass by!'” This is Yeats’s actual epitaph, which he wrote for himself. It’s explicitly not conventional. Not sentimental, not religious consolation, not celebration of his life. Instead, it’s stark: “Cast a cold eye”. Look at life and death with clear vision, without illusion or sentimentality. Accept them as they are. “Horseman, pass by”, the suggestion that he’s indifferent to whether anyone remembers him or mourns him. The rider should pass without stopping, should not be moved to sentiment or worship.

The Radical Honesty

This epitaph is remarkable because it refuses all the consolations that epitaphs typically offer. It doesn’t say “beloved father” or “great poet” or “faithful servant”. It doesn’t promise afterlife or heaven. It simply says: face life and death with clear eyes. Don’t be sentimental. Don’t linger. That’s all that matters.

The epitaph sums up everything Yeats has been saying: forget sentimentality, forget conventional pieties, forget the comfort of easy answers. What remains is clarity, honesty, and the refusal to be fooled by comforting illusions. This is how Yeats wants to be remembered: not as a great man, but as someone who looked at life and death without flinching.