In his final years, W.B. Yeats travelled to the south of France and other Mediterranean locations seeking relief from his deteriorating health, and he suffered from several illnesses including what appears to have been a malarial infection during his time in warm climates. Yeats died in January 1939 in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France, and his late poems — collected in Last Poems (1939) — are marked by a fierce engagement with mortality and physical decline that his illnesses undoubtedly intensified. The mosquito-haunted Mediterranean world of his last years contributed to the urgency of his late verse.

Yeats's late poems, written under the shadow of physical decline and possible mosquito-borne illness, include 'Under Ben Bulben,' 'The Circus Animals' Desertion,' and other works that engage with mortality, artistic legacy, and the body's failure with unsparing directness. The biological reality of illness — whatever its vector — is inseparable from the creative intensity of Yeats's final period, demonstrating how disease and bodily suffering have historically generated some of the most powerful lyric verse. His death in France, far from Ireland, adds another layer to this narrative of the body's vulnerability.