No Ability, No Dignity Can Fail Him Now...

Delmore Schwartz : "Yeats Died Saturday In France"
Published/Written in 1939

Yeats died Saturday in France.
Freedom from his animal
Has come at last in alien Nice,
His heart beat separate from his will:
He knows at last the old abyss
Which always faced his staring face.

No ability, no dignity
Can fail him now who trained so long
For the outrage of eternity,
Teaching his heart to beat a song
In which man's strict humanity,
Erect as a soldier, became a tongue.

This poem about William Butler Yeats, the Nobel Prize winning Irish poet sort of tells us what is true of every one of us. Dignity is truly in the eyes of the beholder after death since it no longer becomes personally necessary for the deceased. But.. before death as it was most likely with Yeats, if the person is aware, perhaps it may be very personally important. ..Maurice.