An Irish Airman Foresees His Death (Critical Overview)

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.’”