At this point the reader notices the tone of indifference in the speaker’s language. The reader’s knowledge that the speaker is an airman makes this necessity even more relevant because balance must be maintained for the speaker to stay alive. Additionally, the conceit of flying “Somewhere among the clouds above” creates a feeling of balance because harmony is crucial if a plane is to remain in flight (Yeats 2). His father had trained as a lawyer, but instead decided to fulfill his life long ambition of becoming a painter. © 2020 Shmoop University Inc | All Rights Reserved | Privacy | Legal. 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. Yeats is, of course, the exception to the other poets in this book: he would deny that he was either a British poet or a war poet. W. B. Yeats's Biography Get the entire guide to “An Irish Airman Foresees his Death” as a printable PDF. (including. For the best experience on our site, be sure to turn on Javascript in your browser. 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. An Irish Airman Foresees his Death Summary & Analysis. Yeats does not wish the airman to be dreamy or melodramatic, instead he wishes to portray him as a man who has considered all his options and has chosen the one best suited to him. I know that I shall meet my fate. Ireland’s long history of explosive separatism with Britain is a well-known story. Poetry for Students. Encyclopedia.com. “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” is composed of four quatrains in a continuous sixteen-line stanza. I know that I shall meet my fate Somewhere among the clouds above; Those that I fight I do not hate Those that I guard I do not love; My country is Kiltartan Cross, My countrymen Kiltartan's poor, No likely … “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” utilizes end rhyme and has an abab rhyme scheme. The poem also serves as a memorial to Robert Gregory, an Irish airman and the son of one of Yeats's close friends who was killed in WWI at the age of 36. 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. A lonely impulse of delight — The poet recites "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death.". These last four lines “balance” the rational and irrational aspects in the poem. W. B. Yeats’s poem, ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’ was written around the same time as Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et decorum est; written in 1918, Yeats withheld its publication until 1919. Sources 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. 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. By entering your email address you agree to receive emails from Shmoop and verify that you are over the age of 13. “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” is composed of sixteen lines that can be divided into four quatrains according to their alternating rhyme scheme and content. Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they. Ellman, Richard, Yeats: The Man and the Masks, New York: Macmillan, 1948. The point of all this regularity and balance (a word the speaker uses, mind you) is to imitate or reflect the speaker's absolute certainty that he will die. This poem is about a pilot who joined the war, not to fight, but for the sheer exhilaration of flying a plane at a time when flight was new. 16 lines/ written in iambic tetrameter/ 4 quatrains of alternating rhymes/ Balance within structure. ." The waste that was his life before flight is worthless to the airman, but he sees the prospect of escape into delight as worth any pain or tragedy that might result. Teachers and parents! The reader can conclude that the speaker is a man as cautious and measured as his balanced words, implying that such a life of strict balance is the waste to which he refers. LitCharts Teacher Editions. An interesting aspect of this poem is its lack of figurative language. 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). While they were on their honeymoon, his young wife, Georgiana HydeLees, discovered that she had abilities as a medium and could communicate with the supernatural world through the technique of automatic writing. FRANK BIDART "Station" is a poem written in free verse by Eamon Grennan, an Irish poet who has spent most of his adult life in the Unit…, Moore, Thomas Ramazani, Jahan, Yeats and the Poetry of Death, Yale University Press, 1990. The focus on Gregory as the airman in the poem should, however, be met with caution. Unfortunately, while good at painting, he was not very successful at exploiting his talent, and the family often suffered from financial hardship. The outrage over British inaction during the famine led to new demands for Irish home rule in the late 1800s. For the poem’s speaker, though, knowing his fate is actually a blessing. Parnell became a hero of the Irish and a symbol of their fight for independence. You see, iambic tetrameter is just like iambic pentameter, except there are four (the prefix tetra- means four) iambs, instead of five. 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. His father, John Butler Yeats, was the son of a once-affluent family whom Oscar Wilde’s father, Sir William Wilde, described as “the cleverest, most spirited people I ever met.” Yeats’s parents had an important influence on the young artist’s life. Each quatrain has an ababrhyme scheme. Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. Encyclopedia.com gives you the ability to cite reference entries and articles according to common styles from the Modern Language Association (MLA), The Chicago Manual of Style, and the American Psychological Association (APA). All is vanity’ (Ecclesiastes 1:2), and, ‘all is vanity and a striving after wind’ (Ecclesiastes 2:17, 26). Under the influence of. Notice the use of consonant sounds in the following line: Read the line aloud and notice the repetition of the “hard-C” sounds in the words “country,” “Kiltartan,” and “Cross.”. 1991: An international coalition of armed forces was assembled to successfully halt Iraq’s expansion into Kuwait. I know that I shall meet my fate He acknowledges that he cannot explain why he chose to fight for a country that is at odds with his own: only ‘A lonely impulse of delight / Drove to this tumult in the clouds.’ Call this what you will, a death wish, a desire to feel something instead of nothing, but it is neither resentment nor passion.
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