First published in the collection The Wild Swans at Coole in 1919, “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” was written to commemorate the death of 1919 Robert Gregory, the son of Yeats’s patron, Lady Gregory. Yeats wrote two other poems about Robert Gregory, which are also included in The Wild Swans at Coole. These are “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,” and “Shepherd and Goatherd.” Throughout the poem, the speaker contemplates his fate and attempts to balance his conflict, that is whether to accept life or death. In doing so, he methodically notes that he feels separated from his country and from the reasons most men go to war. The speaker might be considered indifferent to both life and death, but toward the end of the poem the reader realizes how important the theme of balance is. The speaker reveals that for him, life and death are balanced, or equal, and in choosing one he has, in a sense, chosen both. An interesting aspect of this poem is its lack of figurative language. Why would Yeats chose to use so little imagery in this poem? Perhaps it adds to the tone of the poem. Notice that the subject of the poem is solemn. Vivid images might detract from the solemnity of the subject. Also consider that the language of the poem contributes to the characterization of the speaker. Yeats does not wish the airman to be dreamy or melodramatic, instead he wishes to portray him as a man who has considered all his options and has chosen the one best suited to him.

Author Biography

Yeats was born in Dublin on June 13, 1865, the eldest of four children. His father, John Butler Yeats, was the son of a once-affluent family whom Oscar Wilde’s father, Sir William Wilde, described as “the cleverest, most spirited people I ever met.” Yeats’s parents had an important influence on the young artist’s life. His father had trained as a lawyer, but instead decided to fulfill his life long ambition of becoming a painter. Unfortunately, while good at painting, he was not very successful at exploiting his talent, and the family often suffered from financial hardship. Yeats’s mother Susan Pollexfen Yeats, the daughter of a successful merchant from Sligo in western Ireland, was descended from a line of intense, eccentric people interested in faeries and astrology. From his mother Yeats inherited a love of Ireland, particularly the region surrounding Sligo, and an interest in the folklore of the local peasantry.

Not until he was eleven years old, when he began attending the Godolphin Grammar School in Hammersmith, England, did Yeats receive any type of formal schooling. From there he went on to the Erasmus Smith High School in Dublin, where he a generally disappointing student—erratic in his studies, prone to daydreaming, shy, and poor at sports. In 1884 Yeats enrolled in the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin, where he met the poet George Russell. With Russell, Yeats founded the Dublin Hermetic Society for the purposes of conducting magical experiments and promoting their belief that “whatever the great poets had affirmed in their finest moments was the nearest we could come to an authoritative religion and that their mythology and their spirits of water and wind were but literal truth.” This organization marked Yeats’s first serious activity in occult studies, a fascination which he would continue for the rest of his life, and the extent of which was revealed only when his unpublished notebooks were examined after his death. Yeats joined the Rosicrucians, the Theosophical Society, and MacGregor Mathers’s Order of the Golden Dawn. Frequently consulting spiritualists and engaging in the ritual conjuring of Irish gods, Yeats used his knowlegde of the occult as a source of images for his poetry, and traces of his esoteric interests appear everywhere in his poems.

In 1885 Yeats met Irish nationalist John O’Leary, who helped turn his attention to Celtic nationalism and who was instrumental in arranging for the publication of Yeats’s first poems in The Dublin University Review. Under the influence of

O’Leary, Yeats took up the cause of Gaelic writers at a time when much native Irish literature was in danger of being lost as the result of England’s attempts to anglicize Ireland through a ban on the Gaelic language. On January 30, 1889 Yeats met Maud Gonne, an actress whose great beauty would haunt him for the rest of his life. Gonne, a passionate agitator for the nationalist cause in Ireland, intrigued and dismayed Yeats with her reckless destructiveness in pursuit of her political goals. They were united in their common desire to see Ireland freed from English domination. During this period Yeats focused his attention on drama, hoping to spark a renewed interest in Irish literature and culture. Despite her many rejections of his offers of marriage, Yeats and Gonne remained close personal friends and their relationship endured through many estrangements, including her brief marriage to Major John MacBride. In his love poetry Yeats compared her to Helen of Troy, whose capriciousness led to the destruction of a civilization. To Yeats Gonne represented an ideal, and throughout his life he found the tension between them, as well as their friendship, a source of poetic inspiration.

In 1917, when he was fifty-two years old, Yeats finally married. While they were on their honeymoon, his young wife, Georgiana HydeLees, discovered that she had abilities as a medium and could communicate with the supernatural world through the technique of automatic writing. Late in his life, when decades of struggle by the Irish nationalists had finally culminated in the passage of the Home Rule Bill, Yeats was chosen as one of the sixty members of the new Irish Senate. Leaving the senate in 1928 because of failing health, Yeats devoted his remaining years to poetry. He died on January 28, 1939.

Poem Text

I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

Poem Summary

Lines 1-2

In the opening lines of “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” the speaker introduces the idea of death and that he will die “among the clouds above.” This phrase introduces the idea of “air” in relation to death in the poem. What is interesting about this is that air is often associated with life and breath, but in this instance the clouds, which are composed of air, suggest death as well as the idea of heaven.

Lines 3-4

These lines establish the fact that the speaker feels separated from his role in the war. It seems as though he feels nothing, since he neither hates nor loves. At this point the reader notices the tone of indifference in the speaker’s language.

Lines 5-6

Here the speaker identifies his place of birth and the reader notices that the alliteration in these lines emphasizes a sense of pride in the tone of the speaker.

Media Adaptations

“The Poetry of William Butler Yeats” is available on audio cassette from Audiobooks.

Lines 7-8

These lines immediately halt the tone in the former two lines by stating that either outcome of the war will have little effect on the poor of Kiltartan Cross. The speaker seems to have an extremely rational view of the world.

Lines 9-12

The speaker states that the usual attraction of war did not entice him, and that he chose to become a soldier because of “a lonely impulse of delight.” This is the first irrational note to the speaker. The word “tumult” is used to describe the speaker’s occupation in the line immediately following. This is in sharp contrast to the extremely rational view of the speaker earlier in the poem, and since it is juxtaposed with the clouds it brings to mind the subject of heaven that was introduced at the beginning of the poem.

Lines 13-16

These last four lines “balance” the rational and irrational aspects in the poem. The speaker reveals that the rational world he comes from offers irrational answers to problems, such as war, while the irrational world of the clouds offers both an “impulse of delight” and death. The speaker balances life and death by comparing them both to a “waste of breath.” This brings back the idea of air as life, but it is labelled a waste. By equating life and death, the speaker enables himself to accept his death.

Themes

Patriotism

It is clear that the pilot, serving in Britain’s Royal Air Force, does not feel patriotism in the traditional sense of the word: he neither loves the ones he protects nor hates those he fights. He does feel a sense of identity, but it is with the people of Ireland, specifically those of Kiltartan. The reason this does not seem to make sense to the reader is that the political situation he lives under has split the word patriotism into two meanings. Usually, we think of a patriot as fighting for his or her own country. In this case, though, because Ireland is under British control, the country that the airman is fighting for is one country, while his country is a completely different one to him. One imagines that much in colonial life must have created this sort of dilemma, with citizens owing their loyalty to both the government over their heads and also a distant government across the sea. Yeats has dramatized this situation to its fullest by putting the airman in a life-or-death situation. The poem also makes the situation as pathetic as it could be by having the airman lay down his life for the country in which he does not believe. It is arguable whether this approach would be as effective in stirring Irish patriotism as well as a straightforward, pro-Irish poem would, but Yeats was writing about an actual occurrence, and this issue of dual loyalty (or loyalty versus affection) certainly is worth being examined.

Fate

The power of this poem lies in its first line: the speaker is not trying to beat his fate, nor is he trying to make things work out to his advantage. He is so certain that he will die that he uses the term “meet my fate” to mean the same thing as “die,” accepting the fact that he has no other possible fate except dying. The reader is meant to see this sort of fatalism as depressing; it should shock us and give us a sense of waste to find out that a young, healthy man feels that he has nothing left to live for or look forward to. For the poem’s speaker, though, knowing his fate is actually a blessing. Freed of his responsibility to make the world better in the future or preserve the life he has known, he is able to act spontaneously—to follow “a lonely impulse of delight” by flying off into the clouds.

Yeats is bending the rules of reality by making the speaker so absolutely certain of his fate: the ability to predict the future is always flawed by the fact that something unexpected could come up. On the other hand, the poet does support the speaker’s certainty by telling us that he has thought this through completely, “brought all to mind.” We are not told exactly why his past and future are so pointless, but we are given a pretty good guess in

Topics for Further Study

This poem is about a pilot who joined the war, not to fight, but for the sheer exhilaration of flying a plane at a time when flight was new. Yeats concentrates on war and politics, but he does not give any in-depth description of what the speaker must feel like when flying. Try to capture that feeling in a poem.
Randall Jarrell’s poem “Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” published during World War II uses more concrete imagery to shock the reader about the senselessness of war. What is the same in the ideas these two poems have about war? What is different? Explain why you think the two poets chose to write about aviators. What does Yeats’s pilot say about flying that Jarrell’s gunner would disagree with?
During the First World War, many Irish citizens were reluctant to participate in a war that they felt was chiefly England’s concern, and many Irishmen who enlisted in the Royal Air Force had to explain themselves to hostile relatives and friends. Do you think many young men, like the one in this poem, joined the Air Force in spite of their political beliefs? Do you think people join the Armed Services today for similar reasons? explain.

lines 3 and 4 and also in lines 7 and 8. It was the political situation that made an Irishman fight for Britain that made his life worthless and left him ready to die.

Obedience

Given how strongly this poem makes the point that its speaker does not hate those that he fights, love those he protects, or hope to benefit those that he does love, readers justifiably wonder why this man is in the air force. The most obvious answer would be that he is flying a plane because it is fun, which would be another way of stating what the poem calls an “impulse of delight.” This makes more sense when we consider how new flight was in 1918: while we take flight for granted as a mode of transportation today, it seemed like a metaphor for unattached freedom to the first people to witness airplanes above them in the sky. If Yeats’s point was to associate being Irish with flying free in the sky, though, it proves to be a bit naive. First, the speaker’s lack of love for Britain does not change the fact thr he is being just as obedient as any Londoner who is in the service out of a sense of patriotic duty. The poet seems to feel that the lack of commitment an Irishman feels is the important thing, but to the British Royal Air Force, the important thing is that he follows commands. Also, saying that an “impulse” led the speaker to this moment oversimplifies the process of military training and flight training. Knowledge of the real world tells us that this speaker has been much more obedient to the British cause than the poem cares to discuss.

Style

“An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” is composed of four quatrains in a continuous sixteen-line stanza. Each quatrain has an abab rhyme scheme. The poem uses the iambic tetrameter form of meter and employs alliteration.

A quatrain is a stanza composed of four lines of verse which may or may not have a set length. In this poem the quatrains are not separated.

When a stanza in a poem has a pattern of rhymes it is called a rhyme scheme. “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” utilizes end rhyme and has an abab rhyme scheme. This means that the end of the first line of a stanza rhymes with the end of the third line, and the end of the second line of a stanza rhymes with the end of the fourth line.

Iambic means that the poem is arranged in iambs which are composed of one unaccented syllable followed by an accented syllable. Examine the following line from “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death:”

I know that I shall meet my fate ...

When the iambs are identified and the stresses indicated, the line appears this way:

I know   / that I   / shall meet   / my fate   ...

Read the line aloud and notice the emphasis on the stressed syllables.

Tetrameter means that there are four metric units to each line, “tetra” meaning four. Since “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” mainly uses iambic tetrameter, there are four iambs in each line of the poem.

Alliteration is the repetition of certain consonants in a poem, which is often used in order to create a musical sound. Notice the use of consonant sounds in the following line:

My country is Kiltartan Cross

Read the line aloud and notice the repetition of the “hard-C” sounds in the words “country,” “Kiltartan,” and “Cross.”

Historical Context

Yeats was not interested in being a war poet: he was much more concerned with the Irish struggle for independence from Britain than with international conflicts. In 1915, when American novelist Edith Wharton asked him for a war poem for a book she was editing, Yeats wrote “A Reason For Keeping Silent,” which was later renamed “On Being Asked For A War Poem.” It starts out with the lines “I think it better at times like these / We poets keep our mouths shut; for in truth / We have no gift to set a statesman right.” There is record of his having mentioned in a letter later that year to the novelist Henry James that this was the only thing he would ever write about war. His attitude changed in 1918, though, when Robert Gregory, the son of Yeats’s close friend Lady Gregory, was shot down over Italy while fighting for the British in World War I. Yeats wrote three poems about Gregory’s death: “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,” “Elegy,” and this one.

Predominantly Catholic Ireland had been under the control of predominantly Protestant England since the 1160s, when the Normans invaded under the protection of England’s King Henry II. Throughout the centuries, Ireland was treated as an English resource. England felt free to extract whatever useable resources could be found; they took over land, relocated Irish citizens, and arrested and executed dissenters. From 1845 to 1848, Ireland suffered one of that country’s most destructive periods—the potato crops were ruined by blight for four consecutive years. During the Great Famine, a million Irish citizens died of starvation and epidemics of typhus and cholera, and two million more emigrated to England or North America. In the face of this poverty, disease and starvation, the ruling British government did little to make life easier.

Compare & Contrast

1919: As a result of the end of World War I, the Versailles Peace Conference was convened, producing the League of Nations to assure world peace.
1939-1945: The nations of Europe were involved in World War II, aligned approximately as they had been for the previous war.
1991: An international coalition of armed forces was assembled to successfully halt Iraq’s expansion into Kuwait.
Today: The United Nations (successor to the League of Nations) sends peace-keeping forces around the globe. Opponents object to risking their lives for the safety of foreign nations.
1917: Sinn Fein party members in Parliament proclaimed an independent Irish republic, organizing their own Parliament.
1920: The Government of Ireland Act established two separate Irelands: Northern Ireland, which was a part of the United Kingdom but with its own home-rule Parliament, and the free state of Ireland, which in 1922 became an independent dominion within the British Commonwealth.
1938: The constitution of Ireland was revised to sever all ties with Britain.
Today: Britain and Northern Ireland are attempting to conduct peace talks that would end the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland.

This lack of concern raised Irish anger against British control: after all, they reasoned, what is a government for, if not to save lives and respond to end catastrophes? A bitterness grew so deep between the two countries that Irish historians to this day sometimes refer to the famine as a British genocide, or a plan to systematically kill off an entire ethnic population.

The outrage over British inaction during the famine led to new demands for Irish home rule in the late 1800s. Yeats grew up in a family where politics and art were discussed openly, and he and his friends were well aware of the activities of Irish nationalists. One of the most significant of these was Charles Stewart Parnell, who led the campaign to end Ireland’s extreme poverty by fighting against the (mostly English) landlords who oppressed citizens in the 1880s. Parnell became a hero of the Irish and a symbol of their fight for independence. In 1891, when Parnell died, Yeats quickly wrote an elegy titled “Mourn—And Then Onward!” for the pro-Parnell paper United Ireland. The work was popular, but Yeats considered it a badly written poem and never included it in any books. There are, however, several homages to Parnell that he wrote that are frequently included in collections of Yeats’s works.

On Easter Monday of 1916, two years before Yeats wrote “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death,” an event happened that turned relations between England and Ireland into the war of terrorism and repression that it has been for most of this century. Two independence organizations, the Republican Brotherhood led by Padraic Pearse and the Citizens’ Army, led by James Connelly, staged a revolt in Dublin. They took control of several points around the city, and Pearse had time to give a speech on the steps of the main post office before the British Army came in firing weapons. In the end, 60 rebels, 130 British troops, and 300 citizens died. The British then imposed martial law over the country and had thousands of Irish leaders arrested and taken to Britain, where fifteen of them, including Pearse and Connelly, were executed. This outraged the Irish so much that Sinn Fein, the Irish nationalistic party that had been established in 1899, won 73 of the 105 Irish seats in the British House of Commons that December. The Irish Republican Army, which had been formed in 1919, began using guerrilla tactics—such as placing bombs in commuter buses and shopping centers—against the British. Parliament responded to the violence by outlawing Sinn Fein. In 1921 the country was divided into two separate entities: the free state of Ireland was allowed to govern itself, while Northern Ireland remained under British control. The North’s quest for independence continues to this day.

Critical Overview

“An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” is one of the three poems written on the occasion of the death of Yeats’s friend Robert Gregory. Critic John Lucas, in his book Modern English Poetry-Hardy to Hughes: A Critical Survey, mentions that this poem was not only used to mourn the loss of Gregory but also to “affirm his commitment to values that are, so it seems, to become time’s victims.” According to Lucas, Yeats wished to show that Gregory chose death in order to escape the waste of age. He explains, “Yeats implies that Gregory knew his work to be finished in one brief flaring of creative intensity and that he therefore chose death rather than wasting into unprofitable old age.” Lucas goes on to mention that the poem is essentially concerned with the balance between life and death. “Yeats presents Gregory in the act of balancing all, seeing himself poised between ’this life, this death.’”

Criticism

Jhan Hochman

Jhan Hochman is a freelance writer and currently teaches at Portland Community College, Portland, OR. In the following essay, Hochman debates two central questions: the identity—specific or general—of the airman, and if the poem serves as a eulogy for a hero or is a statement on the pointlessness of war.

Only one thing brings the Irish airman of Yeats’s poem to war: “A lonely impulse of delight.” Absent are the usual reasons for fighting—for one’s nation, people, or family. But what exactly is this “lonely impulse of delight?” Is it the thought of defeating boredom? Self-challenge? Adventure and excitement? Does the poem mourn and memorialize the loss of an independent hero following his own call, unmoved by law, pressure, propaganda, or public fever? Or is the poem a reverie or reflection on the airman’s wasted life and wasted death?

The anonymous airman of Yeats’s “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” is Robert Gregory (1881-1918), only son of Yeats’s close friend and collaborator, the playwright and translator Lady Gregory (1852-1932). In all, there are four poems devoted to Robert Gregory, the other three being: “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,” “Shepherd and Goatherd,” and “Reprisals.” All except “Reprisals” were published in the collection The Wild Swans at Coole.“Reprisals” was held from publication because Yeats was afraid the poem might offend Lady Gregory because it questioned whether her son had wasted his life fighting for the British. Most scholars maintain that Yeats was not close with Robert Gregory, and if so, one may wonder if the Gregory quartet was written less as a tribute to the major than as a consolation to his mother, Lady Gregory. In the quartet, Major Gregory was praised by Yeats as a renaissance man, or as he is called in “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,” “soldier, scholar, horseman.” In this same, poem Gregory is praised (some say overpraised) as a lover of nature, a painter, and as someone who understood work in metal, wood, stone, and plaster. In “Shepherd and Goatherd,” the person mourned was a gentle shepherd who played a stone flute and “was best in every country sport / And every country craft.” And in “Reprisals,” Gregory is a crack fighter pilot who shoots down 19 planes before dying himself. In fact, Gregory was a decorated pilot for the British Air Force in World War I who, unbeknownst to Yeats or Lady Gregory, crashed over Italy most likely as the result of “friendly fire.” Italy seems an interesting place for Gregory to die: he and Yeats had been taken with Castiglione’s The Courtyer,(1561) as had English poets Thomas Wyatt and Edmund Spenser before them. The ideal courtier, according to the symposium in The Courtyer, should unite ethical and intellectual excellence with military and sporting prowess, but display such talents only with graceful ease and nonchalance. It is then no surprise that Yeats also compares Gregory—“In Memory of Major Robert Gregory”—with Sir Philip Sydney, another poet and legendary military hero influenced by Castiglione. Sydney not only died in action, but supposedly in an act of heroism. Gregory died an unheroic and uncanny death in Italy—uncanny since Italy was the home of Castiglione. The focus on Gregory as the airman in the poem should, however, be met with caution. Because Gregory is not named in this poem and is in two of the others, the effect is to render the airman more of an everyman or “everysoldier” or an “every Irish soldier” fighting in the British military. This, perhaps, warrants a transition from a discussion of the man, Gregory, to the Irish airman in “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” and finally to the other three poems devoted to Gregory.

“An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” primarily employs four pairs of eight-syllable lines. Each line pair generally contains one accented syllable followed by an unaccented syllable; this rhythmic pattern is called “iambic tetrameter.” The rhyme scheme follows abab format. The poem’s rather common rhythm hardly appears formal enough for an elegy. Instead it seems to almost undercut the seriousness of the poem’s subject, as if this common form mocked or remarked on the commonality of content. In this way, Yeats might well have been positing a romantic tradition of Castiglione’s courtier—which had a long history in English literature before Yeats and Gregory—as rather tiresome or common.

The poem is a soliloquy or dramatic monologue in which a World War I Irish airman appears to display fearless equanimity and cold-sober honesty before his imminent death. Resigned to his fate, the airman begins a series of balancing acts: he neither hates those he fights (the Germans), nor loves those for whom he fights (the British). Ireland’s long history of explosive separatism with Britain is a well-known story. Since the late 19th century, Ireland has sought complete independence from British rule. And though the airman fights on the side of the British, he asserts himself as an Irishman, specifically from a region with a distinctive history and dialect: Kiltartan Cross(roads), a barony in County Galway whose specific history and folklore Lady Gregory extensively researched and recorded. Further, if, as the pilot asserts, he aligns himself with the poor, he also understands that neither his actions nor the outcome of the war will make any appreciable difference for the class with whom he feels aligned. (Gregory, by the way, was not poor.) So why did the Irishman enlist? Not because of law, duty, or public pressure, but because of a “lonely impulse of delight.” This kernel of free will—of individualism—is what several critics believe Yeats was not only praising, but was singling out as the thrust of the poem. Apparently, Gregory himself was indeed happy to have joined up. In “Reprisals,” Yeats shares what appears to be a snippet of one of Gregory’s letters from the front: “I have had more happiness in one year than in all other years.” Gregory’s risky happiness in “An Irish Airman,” while short-lived, has been worth the wasted past and what looks up ahead like a

What Do I Read Next?

Peter de Rosa tells the full story of Ireland’s struggle for identity at the time of the First World War in his 1990 historical analysis Rebels: The Irish Rising of 1916.
Ten years after Yeats’s death, A. Norman Jefferies wrote what many consider to be the definitive biography of the poet. As the years passed, new information came out, and so he rewrote his book forty years later as W.B. Yeats: A New Biography.
Though Yeats did not consider himself a war poet, this poem is usually included with poetry from World War I. One of the best World War I poets, whose writing was more adventurous and less philosophical, was Wilfred Owen. His poems are all available in one 1963 edition, The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen.
Douglas Archibald’s book Yeats, published in 1983, has more literary criticism than Jefferies’s aforementioned biography.
Any student of Yeats should go to the most definitive source of explanation of his poems. Organized as a series of footnotes, A New Commentary on William Butler Yeats by A. Norman Jefferies, published in 1984, makes good reading in itself, but it is a wealth of information when used to help interpret particular poems.

wasted future. This short period of warfare—a kind of suspended death or death-in-life that Gregory nonetheless experiences as more intensely alive—has been worth his wasted life before the war and the wasted life that, apparently, he thought would most assuredly have followed.

Despite the airman’s happiness, bravery, and assertion of independent will, or specifically, his “lonely impulse of delight,” it is difficult to conclude what, in fact, Yeats is praising. The poem’s last line, “In balance with this life, this death,” is not clear. There are at least two interpretations possible of “this life”: one could be the airman’s life as a fighter pilot, and the other could be his wasted time away from war, including his projected wasted future as a live man. If the former reading seems plausible, the airman’s “delightful” life as a fighter has equal worth with his death, and thus a positive spin can be imposed on the airman’s death—that it was worth the excitement and triumphs. But if “this life” refers to a wasteland, then death seems, on balance, every bit a waste as the airman’s life. Because the airman is not praised in this poem as the renaissance man of “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,” readers may be hard put, without knowing anything about Gregory, to object to the pilot’s own assertion that his life was a “waste of breath.” Staying within the poem—especially keeping knowledge of Gregory outside of its interpretation—makes it difficult to sort out whether the poem is an encomium to the independent will of the soldier who fought the good fight against the evil enemy, or a sub-genre of the antiwar poem focusing on war’s utter meaninglessness.

Looking beyond “An Irish Airman,” that is, now reading and synthesizing all four poems of the Gregory quartet, the balance is tipped to the weightier side of “An Irish Airman” as an anti-war poem. First, Robert Gregory is depicted in “Shepherd and Goatherd” (not by name) and “In Memory” as a man whose incredibly productive life seems everything but a waste. Second, Yeats and Gregory were both Irish nationalists, or Republicans, who wanted the British out of Ireland. Their dreams of Irish independence were postponed by British participation in World War I. While Gregory and Yeats were both sympathetic to the British as the lesser—when put beside Germany—of two evils, neither were fond of fighting and dying for a British cause. Nowhere is this more clear than in “Reprisals,” in which Yeats describes the British, especially the British Black and Tan soldiers of 1920, in Ireland: “Half-drunk or whole mad soldiery / Are murdering your tenants there” (the Gregorys owned land in Ireland). And at the end of “Reprisals” Major Gregory is not depicted as a hero of independent will, but as one of the “cheated dead” whose fighting and dying was a tragic waste, since all the Irish gained from helping the British was more of the same: British occupation. Commentators on “An Irish Airman” have perhaps mistaken Yeats’s praise of Robert Gregory—the eulogy of his accomplishments or the mourning for his loss in all of the quartet’s poems except for “Reprisals”—for praise of the Irish airman’s “lonely impulse of delight.” But even without reading the other three poems in the Gregory quartet—poems written at different times and perhaps with different mindsets—the poem thuds too deeply at the end to be a flattering eulogy for a death resulting from the exciting exertion of an independent will. It is far more likely that this Irish airman is not just Robert Gregory, but every Irish soldier who fell while fighting a British cause or, for that matter, every minority soldier who has fought abroad for the freedom of a country that cheated him of his freedoms at home.

Source: Jhan Hochman, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1997.

Sources

Adams, Hazard, The Book of Yeats’s Poems, Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1990.

Cullingford, Elizabeth, Yeats, Ireland and Fascism, New York University Press, 1981.

Ellman, Richard, Yeats: The Man and the Masks, New York: Macmillan, 1948.

Ramazani, Jahan, Yeats and the Poetry of Death, Yale University Press, 1990.

Stallworthy, Jonathan, Between the Lines: Yeats’s Poetry in the Making, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963.

Timm, Eitel, W. B. Yeats: A Century of Criticism, Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1987.

Yeats, William Butler, The Poems, revised edition edited by Richard J. Finneran, New York: Macmillan, 1989.

Lucas, John, “W.B. Yeats: The Responsibilities of the Poet,” in Modern English Poetry—From Hardy to Hughes: A Critical Survey, Batsford Ltd., 1986, pp. 103-129.

For Further Study

Ardagh, John, Ireland and the Irish: Portrait of a Changing Society, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1994.

This source tries a bit too much to soften the violence and oppression that are a fact of recent Irish history. As the dust jacket describes, the book is “upbeat.” The facts are here, but the tone is more pro-British than a nationalist like Yeats would accept.

Crawford, Fred D., British Poets of the Great War, Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1988.

Yeats is, of course, the exception to the other poets in this book: he would deny that he was either a British poet or a war poet. Still, readers can get a good sense of the time and the situation from this work.

O’Broin, Leon, Protestant Nationalists in Revolutionary Ireland: The Stopford Connection, Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble Books, 1995.

This book looks at the movement for independence in the late 1800s and early 1900s, concentrating on one family, the Stopfords, and their acquaintances. Yeats, of course, is one of those acquaintances.

Tuohy, Frank, Yeats, New York: MacMillan Publishing Co., 1976.

A much more complex and comprehensive biography than it first seems, this book contains much information about Yeats’s family, especially his father, and puts the poet’s amazing works into the perspective of his life.

Poetry for Students