An Irish Airman Foresees His Death (Historical Context)

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.

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.

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.