An Irish Airman Foresees His Death
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.
Commentary
Simple, almost mundane language, and yet resonant. There is little need to add “explanations” to this poem; it speaks for itself. However, I can’t help mentioning that the last stanza – especially the repetition of the words “waste of breath” – is one of my all time favourite poem slices.
Although the poem can be enjoyed on its own, it is interesting to learn the circumstances that led to its creation. The unnamed narrator in this poem was meant to be Major Robert Gregory, the son of Lady Augusta Gregory, the single most influential person in Yeats’ life and writings.
Robert himself was an artist (painter) whom Yeats respected and collaborated with; he designed numerous side sets for Yeats’ plays. In this poem Yeats celebrates the self-chosen nature of Robert Gregory’s death (he did die fighting, while an airman). For more glimpses of this man’s life and his influence on Yeats’ read the (somewhat longish) “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory”.
[ Info from “The Yeats Companion” by Ulick O’Connor ]
— Amit
[Chacko has asked me to supply the rest of the annotation, so…. -m.]
Biographical Notes
Yeats was born in Dublin on June 13, 1865, the eldest of four children. […] Yeats’ 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’ 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’ Order of the Golden Dawn. Frequently consulting spiritualists and engaging in the ritual conjuring of Irish gods, Yeats used his knowledge 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’ 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.
– excerpted from Exploring Poetry, Gale, 1997. see
http://www.nelson.com/gale/poetry/yeatsbio.html for the whole essay.
Criticism
“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.’”
– Exploring Poetry, Gale, 1997.
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From the Wondering Minstrels mailing list, 1999–2008.
G B · 28 November 2004
I am interested to read that Robert Gregory himself ‘was an artist (painter) whom Yeats respected and collaborated with; he designed numerous side sets for Yeats’ plays.’ Perhaps Yeats was more attracted to Gregory than the other way around - I read a newspaper article a few years ago that indicated that Gregory did not like Yeats very much, finding him rather strange, and was not pleased by the frequency of his visits to his mother’s house (Rathcoole, if memory serves me correctly). If this is true, it is ironic that Gregory owes his place in history to this striking poem. Shane McGowan of the Pogues and the Cafe Orchestra have put it to music in a quite remarkable version which was made available on a CD of Yeats’ poems put to music a few years ago.
GB, Ireland
Lt Abhilash Tomy · 6 December 2005
I strongly disagree with Lucas. This is not a poem that mourns the passing of Gregory. In fact it is anything but that. You need to be a pilot to know what it is all about. There is not greater joy or source of delight for a fighter than to be flying his fighter. In fighting an enemy he is not protecting his homeland though that is how it would appear to the men below. The presence of another is not treated in the same vein as the presence of an enemy. What our airman sees is a competitor, someone who has staked claim to his supremacy in the air. Therefore I fight, to prove who is the better. What the landlubber thinks of me is a myth. I dont protect anyone below, I dont yearn for glory, but the simple delight flying my craft in a manner other men have not. The death of my enemy is immaterial to me. His death is not because he fought for the wrong ideal. For he died because he did not fly as well as i did. Someday I too will die becuase I would not have flown as well as the other did. Yet that death is what I look forward to. Nothing else is acceptable. Its a certainty. There is an inevitability in my death. But that is because I choose it to be so. I know no other delight. There is no greater joy. The poem is actually very simple. Lucas need not read in between the lines and try to derive meanings that yeats was not intending to imply. However, the fact that the poem stands in stark contrast to what shaw implies in his play (I cant recollect the name) must be noticed. Shaw (in the chance encounter of a foot soldier with a lady) impresses how experience teaches a soldier that the preservation of ones life is more important thann anything else and how romantic notions attached to war was a purely civilian idea. Yeats on the other hand brings in that same denounced romantic notions into the airman’s death in the poem though in a somewhat uncivilian manner. Fly. You will know. How it feels to be so close to God. So close, you almost feel as if you were God. What then would I care about Kiltartan’s poor!
Regards
Lt Abhilash Tomy
McGillicuddy Colin · 31 March 2006
There is more here than the simple love of flying. The Irish airman is fighting another’s war, isn’t he? One that he really has no stake in, and one his countrymen claim no stake in.
Yes, he loves to fly, and yes, he does not fear death - but not so much out of heroism as out of disdain for what he leaves behind.
Colin McGillicuddy
Principal
St. Thomas Aquinas RCSS
124 Dorval Drive
Oakville, ON
L6K 2W1
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GaGin1 · 2 April 2008
Comments on an Irish Airman.
Gregory actually spent most of his life growing up in England, going to Harrow and Oxford, then to the Slade School of art in London.He knew Yeats from childhood on, because he often visited Lady Gregory’s home at Coole Park. The two were ambiguous about each other. Gregory did not Yeats hanging around so much, and, when he came to his majority, he inherted Coole Park; but he was not ready to take over as an Irish landlord; he was In England, where he met his wife Margaret and they wed in 1907. They had three children, a son and two daughters. Gregory was quite ready to fight for the British, and Yeats dislike of the Brits may have produced the line “those that I guard I do not love.” Yeats tried severalpoems before this one, none of which fully satisfied Lady Gregory, who was pressing Yeats for a poem as it would be all that was really left of Gregory.Finally Yeats cast the poem in a classic mode, the eclogue. This gave him distance between himself and the subject, who he knew all too well personally. Gregory is credited with 19 kills, a fact that Yeats and Lady Gregory seemed oblivious to. There is a mystery about his death; some claim friendly fire, but there is also the possibility of anoxia, as the plane appeared to have fallen from a great height in a spin and was “a complete wreck.”In fact his fellow pilots said he just seemed to faint away, which would correspond to anoxia; but critics think it is a phoney letter, and that he was killed by friendly fire. But there is a problem: several witnesses say there were no Italian a/c in the air that day. Possibly, since the ceilng was only 1000 feet, if he ducked down to see where he was, Italian groundfire could have gotten him.But that isa short fall, a crash not a “complete wreck.” Gregory was not feeling well from an innoculation, which could have heightened his susceptibility to anoxia. Shaw wrote Lady Gregory after the war that when he had met Gregory when he was in squadron 40, commanded by Robert Loraine, that although Gregory was recovering from frostbite of the face, he told Shaw these last six months had been the happiest of his life.
Lannie Liggera