Death

The first appearance of agency in Yeats’s poem is in the first line. Notably, it is not an animal or man who is acting, but the “dread [and] hope,” which do not “attend” to the dying animal (Line 1). Though it is worded such that neither “dread nor hope” actually act, the syntax shows they are the subjects which act upon the object of the “animal” (Line 2). This is important because, along with the animal’s mortality being introduced as a grammatical modifying quality (“a dying animal [emphasis added]”), no sense of action or agency is attributed to the animal in question. Instead, the animal is grammatically completely passive, it lacks will in addition to its lack of emotion.

The man introduced in the second couplet, however, is given quite a bit of agency. Instead of “dying,” he actively “awaits his end” (Line 3). Instead of either being or not being attended to by his emotions, he is in a state of actively “Dreading and hoping all” (Line 4). The chiastic structure (words or phrases repeated in reverse order) of the first four lines makes any variation between the animal and the man stand out very clearly in the midst of