Poems I Journey With 19

A young W.B. Yeats

Tonight, yet again, I wish to reproduce here a poem by that greatest of Irish poets W.B. Yeats. In this year of centenaries as we Irish call this commemorative year of 2016, that is, that it celebrates both our national Rising and some of the greatest battles of the Great War.

An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

(By W. B. Yeats, 1865 – 1939)

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 end could bring them loss

Or leave them happier than before.

Nor public man, nor cheering crowds,

A lonely impulse of delight

Drove to this tumult in the clouds;

I balanced all, brought all to mind,

The years to come seemed waste of breath,

A waste of breath the years behind,

In balance with this life, this death.

Commentary

Yeats wrote this famous poem "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death" in 1918 and it was first published in the Macmillan edition of The Wild Swans at Coole a year later. It is a rather simple lyric written in regular metre, that of iambic tetrameter, that is, in regular lines with four beats or four iambs, that is, “Dee-Dah, Dee-Dah, Dee-Dah, Dee-Dah” with the beat on the second syllable or on the “Dah.”  The rhyme scheme is pretty standard, too, being simply ABAB CDCD EFEF GHGH.  Further, if the reader is a lover of war films he will know that in the movie Memphis Belle, the character Sergeant Danny Daly recites this poem but omits the lines referring to Ireland.

The poem is a dramatic recitation or soliloquy given by an aviator or early flyer from the First World War period in which the narrator describes the circumstances surrounding his imminent and certain death. The poem is a work that discusses the role of Irish soldiers fighting for the United Kingdom during a time when they were trying to establish independence for Ireland.  This was a heady, frightening and tumultuous time in Irish history when families were split between loyalty to the crown and sympathy with the revolutionary nationalist cause. In simple terms, this was a complex and complicated period in Irish history. Wishing to show restraint from publishing political poems during the height of the war, Yeats withheld publication of the poem until after the conflict had ended.

Yeats’ young pilot is just that, young and simply non-partisan. For him it was the adventure of flying itself, then a real novelty, that inspired his action – neither loyalty to the crown nor love for his native soil. In this, Yeats captures brilliantly the way a good number of young men would have felt – that is, young men who were full bloodedly wishing to embrace adventure for adventure sake:

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 end could bring them loss

Or leave them happier than before.

He tells us that no outcome in the war will make their lives worse (“bring them loss”) or better (“happier”) than before the war began. He says that he did not decide to fight because of a law or a sense of duty, nor because of “public men” (politicians) or “cheering crowds.” Rather, “a lonely impulse of delight” drove him to “this tumult in the clouds.”

A First World War Airplane

There is a deep reflectiveness or mindfulness in this poem that makes it a very significant reflection on war and its futility and uselessness. He says that he weighed his life in his mind, and found that “The years to come seemed waste of breath, / A waste of breath the years behind.” In other words, the young pilot is forced to wake up and live in the now because he realises that the past is gone and gone forever, never to return as it is now very much wasted breath. He also realises that his hours are numbered as he realises all too easily that his death is imminent and inevitable and therefore the future has a similar futility bound up with it just as the past has. Hence the years to come are simply wasted breath, too. He is at the now of existence as that’s all he has, this moment now, this reflective now or this mindful now before extinction.  On the one hand this could be seen as a rather tragic arithmetic that forces the young man into the now of awareness or on another level a sort of mystical wakefulness that Yeats would have embraced in his own life. In shaping or forming this poem, Yeats writes in a neatly balanced structure that mirrors or parallels the balance of an aircraft in flight, with its cycles of alternating rhymes and its clipped, stoical meter. In short, in this poem we have Yeats the consummate craftsman and weaver of words at work. Altogether a simply wonderful poem, and one that was used so effectively in that lovely British-American war film Memphis Belle  (1990) that was directed by Michael Caton-Jones and written by Monte Merrick.