An Irish Airman Foresees His Death
In William Butler Yeats' poem, "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death," he focuses on man's inner nature. He touches on the many jumbled thoughts that must race through one's mind at the point when they realize that their death is inevitable. In this poem, these thoughts include the airman's believed destination after leaving Earth, his feelings about his enemies and his supporters, his memories of home, his personal reasons for being in the war and, finally, his view of how he has spent his life. Through telling the airman's possible final thoughts, Yeats shows that there is a great deal more to war than the political disputes between two opposing forces and that it causes men to question everything they have ever known and believed.
At the beginning of the poem, Yeats offers the reader the airman's first believed inner thought. The airman has come to the conclusion that he is going to die. In the words, "I know that I shall meet my fate / Somewhere among the clouds above," the airman seems to have accepted this destiny (lines 1-2). He does not talk about fighting it or wishing it away. He knows the realities of the position that he is in and has decided to fully accept the unavoidable outcome. Although one might envision the airman flying his plane into dangerous territory or possibly imprisoned by the enemy, the poem does not tell the reader what is happening to him. This is consistent with Yeats' style of describing the inward versus the outward events in his poems. Knowing what is happening to the airman would probably not enhance or even affect the poem because Yeats wants the reader to know what is taking place inside this man. It does no...
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...t in it. He seeks to discover the thoughts that one must have as they prepare to die in combat. The airman seems to go through a series of thoughts during the poem as he accepts his fate, touches on his numbness to human life, reflects on his home and his fellow people, cites his reasons for even being in the war, and then claiming his dissatisfaction with his entire life, but not his death. Although Yeats does not tell about the airman's life, the reader is likely to assume that it was the war that caused the airman to think in this way. This shows the profound and dramatic effects that war has on the minds of its prisoners.
Work Cited:
Yeats, William Butler. "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death." The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. 2nd ed. Ed. Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1988. 154-155.
The author begins the poem with the phrase "From my mother's sleep I fell into the State"(1). This I believe refers to the reflection of the gunner's likeliness to his mother's womb, being crowded in the ball of the plane. The "State" refers to the pilot being drafted into the military. The government drafted most men during this time period and in this poem I think that the speaker was drafted. Like most men, he probably felt it was his duty and honor to serve his country. The author in reference to the second line "And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze" (2) might refer to fur around the neck of the pilot to keep him warm from the freezing winds of the sky when hunched down in the ball of the plane. When the author writes "Six miles from earth" (3), I imagine the pilot dropping the plane down from the sky very quickly to hit his target below. I can see the speaker hanging from his little ball not bound by the aspirations that others seek in life, which would be what he is referring to when he says, "loosed from its dream of life" (3). Another thought or interpretation from this line might be that the speaker feels he is not responsible for the lives he is about to destroy on the ground. The following line the
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New York: Norton, 2000. Ramazani, Jahan. " The Elegiac Love Poems: A Woman Dead and Gon(n)e. " In Yeats's Poetry, Drama, and Prose.
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