The Pessimistic W. B. Yeats’ in An Irish Airman Foresees His Death
There are countless manners in which a person can mourn the death of another. Some become engulfed in a state of rage, while others may feel a calm, quiet grief or pity. Some place blame on others for the loss while trying to discover a reason for death. Others may roll several emotions into one large mourning process that includes several stages. In “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death,” W. B. Yeats grieves the death of Major Robert Gregory, son of Lady Gregory, by providing the narrator with an overwhelming sense of apathy toward life. The poem provides a variety of emotions that counter each other to produce a balance that is uniquely pessimistic.
The first-person narrator, presumably the voice of Robert Gregory, allows the reader to connect more easily with the thoughts of Yeats. If the poem were written in the third person, the personal emotions would have been lost. Illustrating a death in the voice of the dead adds sorrow and truth to the work, as an outside narrator would seem more distant from the feelings involved. Yeats may have chosen to express his words through the narrator’s voice as a tribute to Robert Gregory, or because of his friendship with Lady Gregory—or simply because doing so brought him closer to the emotions of the situation in general.
In the final three lines of the poem, the narrator gives the sense that, because of death, there is little value in life. He says that “the years to come seemed waste of breath, / a waste of breath the years behind” (14-15). Such thoughts suggest existentialism, which provides a sense of the lack of meaning or purpose in living—that we simply “exist.” Yet the opening lines...
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... when going into battle, and, ultimately, death (11). This is not to say he feels delight in dying, but that some sense of delight in going to war him brought him there, via combat.
Taken as a whole, “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” is a simple poem about a man dying. Its intricacies lie in the juggling act performed by the narrator that leads to a pessimistic, balanced view of a soldier’s death. When each line is considered carefully, the work becomes more and more complicated. Several emotions are contrasted along the way—possibly an attempt by Yeats to capture the multitude of feelings that must run through the mind of someone dying.
Works Cited
Yeats, William Butler. “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death.” The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. Ed. Richard Ellmann and Robert O’Clair. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 154-155.
Anderson, David L. The Columbia Guide to the Vietnam War. New York: Columbia UP, 2002. Print.
Moss, G. D. (2010). Vietnam: An American Ordeal (6th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education. Retrieved from http://devry.vitalsource.com/books/9781256086260
LeCain, Timothy J. "Lecture 9: Vietnam and the 1960s" , Montana State University, Bozeman, 7, 9, 14 and 16 November 2006.
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