Death

Yeats’s short poem consists of only 12 lines. Although it doesn’t conform to a pre-existing traditional verse form (like a sonnet or villanelle), it does follow definite metrical constraints. Each of the poem’s lines is written in iambic trimeter, combining three sets of iambs (that is, an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable) for a total of six syllables per line.

Iambic is generally considered the most “natural” sounding meters in English, though limiting his line to three feet (a poetic foot is a unit of meter; here most feet are iambs) gives Yeats’s poem a more serious tone. The shorter lines emphasize each individual word and individual line meaning, as they further remove the poem from “natural” speech. This removal also continually emphasizes the solemnity of the poem by relegating it more to the category of “poetic” speech.

Though published in 1933, a time in which poetry was moving further away from traditional forms, metrical constraints, and foregrounded rhyme, Yeats’s short poem makes heavy use of end rhyme (that is, the rhyming of the last words in poetic lines) in addition to its traditional