Contents: IntroductionPoem Text Poem Summary Themes Critical Overview Criticism Sources For Further Study |
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.”
