An Irish Airman Foresees his Death - W.B. Yeats Context Flashcards
Explain the context of the poem
• William Butler (W.B.) Yeats was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1865. He lived during a period of great change in his native country as it fought to achieve full independence from Britain. Some of the events Yeats experienced and wrote about were the 1916 Easter Rising and the Irish Civil War. World War 1 broke out during the latter struggle and many Irishmen went to fight for Britain.
o In this poem, Yeats tries to show how they struggled with their identity as Irishmen who were risking their lives fighting for a country they did not feel was their own.
o He believed passionately in a brand of Irish Nationalism where art and literature revived myth and legend, and where political figures were courageous people who would give Ireland a sense of what it was to be Irish. The question of national identity was never far from the poet’s mind.
o The airman in the poem may well be based on Major Robert Gregory, son of Yeats’ patron Lady Augusta Gregory.
Examine the role of the speaker in the poem
• The speaker, an Irish airman fighting in World War I, declares that he knows he will die fighting among the clouds
o He says that he does not hate those he fights, nor love those he guards. His country is “Kiltartan’s Cross,” his countrymen “Kiltartan’s poor.”
o He says that no outcome in the war will make their lives worse or better than before the war began
o He says that he did not decide to fight because of a law or a sense of duty, nor because of “public men” or “cheering crowds.” Rather, “a lonely impulse of delight” drove him to “this tumult in the clouds.”
o He says that he weighed his life in his mind, and found that “The years to come seemed waste of breath, / A waste of breath the years behind.”
Outline the poem’s structure
• This short sixteen-line poem has a very simple structure: lines metered in iambic tetrameter, and four grouped “quatrains” of alternating rhymes: ABABCDCDEFEFGHGH, or four repetitions of the basic ABAB scheme utilizing different rhymes.
o This is a dramatic monologue arranged in 16 lines of iambic tetrameter grouped in four ‘quatrains’; these quatrains develop the thoughts of the airman as he reflects on his life as a fighter pilot in the British forces.
o Each quatrain has an alternating rhyme scheme.
o This structure reflects the sense of balance that is an important part of both the act of flying and of the airman’s thoughts on his reason for fighting.
o This balance is particularly evident in the line “‘Those that I fight I do not hate,/Those that I guard I do not love;’”.
Explain the purpose of the poem
• This simple poem is one of Yeats’s most explicit statements about the First World War, and illustrates both his active political consciousness (“Those I fight I do not hate, / Those I guard I do not love”) and his increasing propensity for a kind of hard-edged mystical rapture (the airman was driven to the clouds by “A lonely impulse of delight”)
o The poem, which, like flying, emphasizes balance, essentially enacts a kind of accounting, whereby the airman lists every factor weighing upon his situation and his vision of death, and rejects every possible factor he believes to be false: he does not hate or love his enemies or his allies, his country will neither be benefited nor hurt by any outcome of the war, he does not fight for political or moral motives but because of his “impulse of delight”; his past life seems a waste, his future life seems that it would be a waste, and his death will balance his life
o Complementing this kind of tragic arithmetic is the neatly balanced structure of the poem, with its cycles of alternating rhymes and its clipped, stoical meter
