An Irish Airman Foresees His Death (Criticism)

Criticism

Jhan Hochman

Jhan Hochman is a freelance writer and currently teaches at Portland Community College, Portland, OR. In the following essay, Hochman debates two central questions: the identity — specific or general — of the airman, and if the poem serves as a eulogy for a hero or is a statement on the pointlessness of war.

Only one thing brings the Irish airman of Yeats’s poem to war: “A lonely impulse of delight.” Absent are the usual reasons for fighting — for one’s nation, people, or family. But what exactly is this “lonely impulse of delight?” Is it the thought of defeating boredom? Self-challenge? Adventure and excitement? Does the poem mourn and memorialize the loss of an independent hero following his own call, unmoved by law, pressure, propaganda, or public fever? Or is the poem a reverie or reflection on the airman’s wasted life and wasted death?

The anonymous airman of Yeats’s “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” is Robert Gregory (1881-1918), only son of Yeats’s close friend and collaborator, the playwright and translator Lady Gregory (1852-1932). In all, there are four poems devoted to Robert Gregory, the other three being: “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,” “Shepherd and Goatherd,” and “Reprisals.” All except “Reprisals” were published in the collection The Wild Swans at Coole.“Reprisals” was held from publication because Yeats was afraid the poem might offend Lady Gregory because it questioned whether her son had wasted his life fighting for the British. Most scholars maintain that Yeats was not close with Robert Gregory, and if so, one may wonder if the Gregory quartet was written less as a tribute to the major than as a consolation to his mother, Lady Gregory. In the quartet, Major Gregory was praised by Yeats as a renaissance man, or as he is called in “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,” “soldier, scholar, horseman.” In this same, poem Gregory is praised (some say overpraised) as a lover of nature, a painter, and as someone who understood work in metal, wood, stone, and plaster. In “Shepherd and Goatherd,” the person mourned was a gentle shepherd who played a stone flute and “was best in every country sport / And every country craft.” And in “Reprisals,” Gregory is a crack fighter pilot who shoots down 19 planes before dying himself. In fact, Gregory was a decorated pilot for the British Air Force in World War I who, unbeknownst to Yeats or Lady Gregory, crashed over Italy most likely as the result of “friendly fire.” Italy seems an interesting place for Gregory to die: he and Yeats had been taken with Castiglione’s The Courtyer,(1561) as had English poets Thomas Wyatt and Edmund Spenser before them. The ideal courtier, according to the symposium in The Courtyer, should unite ethical and intellectual excellence with military and sporting prowess, but display such talents only with graceful ease and nonchalance. It is then no surprise that Yeats also compares Gregory — “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory” — with Sir Philip Sydney, another poet and legendary military hero influenced by Castiglione. Sydney not only died in action, but supposedly in an act of heroism. Gregory died an unheroic and uncanny death in Italy — uncanny since Italy was the home of Castiglione. The focus on Gregory as the airman in the poem should, however, be met with caution. Because Gregory is not named in this poem and is in two of the others, the effect is to render the airman more of an everyman or “everysoldier” or an “every Irish soldier” fighting in the British military. This, perhaps, warrants a transition from a discussion of the man, Gregory, to the Irish airman in “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” and finally to the other three poems devoted to Gregory.

“An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” primarily employs four pairs of eight-syllable lines. Each line pair generally contains one accented syllable followed by an unaccented syllable; this rhythmic pattern is called “iambic tetrameter.” The rhyme scheme follows abab format. The poem’s rather common rhythm hardly appears formal enough for an elegy. Instead it seems to almost undercut the seriousness of the poem’s subject, as if this common form mocked or remarked on the commonality of content. In this way, Yeats might well have been positing a romantic tradition of Castiglione’s courtier — which had a long history in English literature before Yeats and Gregory — as rather tiresome or common.

The poem is a soliloquy or dramatic monologue in which a World War I Irish airman appears to display fearless equanimity and cold-sober honesty before his imminent death. Resigned to his fate, the airman begins a series of balancing acts: he neither hates those he fights (the Germans), nor loves those for whom he fights (the British). Ireland’s long history of explosive separatism with Britain is a well-known story. Since the late 19th century, Ireland has sought complete independence from British rule. And though the airman fights on the side of the British, he asserts himself as an Irishman, specifically from a region with a distinctive history and dialect: Kiltartan Cross(roads), a barony in County Galway whose specific history and folklore Lady Gregory extensively researched and recorded. Further, if, as the pilot asserts, he aligns himself with the poor, he also understands that neither his actions nor the outcome of the war will make any appreciable difference for the class with whom he feels aligned. (Gregory, by the way, was not poor.) So why did the Irishman enlist? Not because of law, duty, or public pressure, but because of a “lonely impulse of delight.” This kernel of free will — of individualism — is what several critics believe Yeats was not only praising, but was singling out as the thrust of the poem. Apparently, Gregory himself was indeed happy to have joined up. In “Reprisals,” Yeats shares what appears to be a snippet of one of Gregory’s letters from the front: “I have had more happiness in one year than in all other years.” Gregory’s risky happiness in “An Irish Airman,” while short-lived, has been worth the wasted past and what looks up ahead like a wasted future. This short period of warfare — a kind of suspended death or death-in-life that Gregory nonetheless experiences as more intensely alive — has been worth his wasted life before the war and the wasted life that, apparently, he thought would most assuredly have followed.

Despite the airman’s happiness, bravery, and assertion of independent will, or specifically, his “lonely impulse of delight,” it is difficult to conclude what, in fact, Yeats is praising. The poem’s last line, “In balance with this life, this death,” is not clear. There are at least two interpretations possible of “this life”: one could be the airman’s life as a fighter pilot, and the other could be his wasted time away from war, including his projected wasted future as a live man. If the former reading seems plausible, the airman’s “delightful” life as a fighter has equal worth with his death, and thus a positive spin can be imposed on the airman’s death — that it was worth the excitement and triumphs. But if “this life” refers to a wasteland, then death seems, on balance, every bit a waste as the airman’s life. Because the airman is not praised in this poem as the renaissance man of “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,” readers may be hard put, without knowing anything about Gregory, to object to the pilot’s own assertion that his life was a “waste of breath.” Staying within the poem — especially keeping knowledge of Gregory outside of its interpretation — makes it difficult to sort out whether the poem is an encomium to the independent will of the soldier who fought the good fight against the evil enemy, or a sub-genre of the antiwar poem focusing on war’s utter meaninglessness.

Looking beyond “An Irish Airman,” that is, now reading and synthesizing all four poems of the Gregory quartet, the balance is tipped to the weightier side of “An Irish Airman” as an anti-war poem. First, Robert Gregory is depicted in “Shepherd and Goatherd” (not by name) and “In Memory” as a man whose incredibly productive life seems everything but a waste. Second, Yeats and Gregory were both Irish nationalists, or Republicans, who wanted the British out of Ireland. Their dreams of Irish independence were postponed by British participation in World War I. While Gregory and Yeats were both sympathetic to the British as the lesser — when put beside Germany — of two evils, neither were fond of fighting and dying for a British cause. Nowhere is this more clear than in “Reprisals,” in which Yeats describes the British, especially the British Black and Tan soldiers of 1920, in Ireland: “Half-drunk or whole mad soldiery / Are murdering your tenants there” (the Gregorys owned land in Ireland). And at the end of “Reprisals” Major Gregory is not depicted as a hero of independent will, but as one of the “cheated dead” whose fighting and dying was a tragic waste, since all the Irish gained from helping the British was more of the same: British occupation. Commentators on “An Irish Airman” have perhaps mistaken Yeats’s praise of Robert Gregory — the eulogy of his accomplishments or the mourning for his loss in all of the quartet’s poems except for “Reprisals” — for praise of the Irish airman’s “lonely impulse of delight.” But even without reading the other three poems in the Gregory quartet — poems written at different times and perhaps with different mindsets — the poem thuds too deeply at the end to be a flattering eulogy for a death resulting from the exciting exertion of an independent will. It is far more likely that this Irish airman is not just Robert Gregory, but every Irish soldier who fell while fighting a British cause or, for that matter, every minority soldier who has fought abroad for the freedom of a country that cheated him of his freedoms at home.

Source: Jhan Hochman, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1997.

What Do I Read Next?

• Peter de Rosa tells the full story of Ireland’s struggle for identity at the time of the First World War in his 1990 historical analysis Rebels: The Irish Rising of 1916.
• Ten years after Yeats’s death, A. Norman Jefferies wrote what many consider to be the definitive biography of the poet. As the years passed, new information came out, and so he rewrote his book forty years later as W.B. Yeats: A New Biography.
• Though Yeats did not consider himself a war poet, this poem is usually included with poetry from World War I. One of the best World War I poets, whose writing was more adventurous and less philosophical, was Wilfred Owen. His poems are all available in one 1963 edition, The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen.
• Douglas Archibald’s book Yeats, published in 1983, has more literary criticism than Jefferies’s aforementioned biography.
• Any student of Yeats should go to the most definitive source of explanation of his poems. Organized as a series of footnotes, A New Commentary on William Butler Yeats by A. Norman Jefferies, published in 1984, makes good reading in itself, but it is a wealth of information when used to help interpret particular poems.