“In Memory of Major Robert Gregory”
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“In Memory of Major Robert Gregory” manuscript draft
1918
On February 2, 1918, Gregory wrote to Yeats, “The long dreaded telegram has come—Robert has been killed in action.” Her note concludes by asking Yeats to “write something down that we may keep.” The four elegies he subsequently composed had to be written, if not to order, at least so as to satisfy both Gregory and Robert’s widow. Yeats’s first, “Shepherd and Goatherd,” a stilted Arcadian dialogue modeled on the work of 16th-century English poet Edmund Spenser, was clearly inadequate. “In Memory” celebrates Robert as a latter-day Renaissance man and leads to a cathartic closure, in which words are acknowledged as inadequate to fully express the burden of sorrowful feeling. Gregory termed it Robert’s “monument.”
: Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
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