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    An Irish Airman Foresees His Death-3

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    GOLDEN FIZZIK GYM
    An Irish airman fighting in World War I knows that he will die in battle among the clouds. He states that he does not feel hatred for his enemies or love for those he protects. His homeland is an insignificant village and his countrymen will be no better off regardless of the war's outcome. It was a personal impulse rather than duty or patriotism that drove him to join the tumultuous skies. He views both his past and potential future as wasted, so his life and death achieve balance.

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    An Irish Airman Foresees His Death-3

    Uploaded by

    GOLDEN FIZZIK GYM
    102 views2 pages
    An Irish airman fighting in World War I knows that he will die in battle among the clouds. He states that he does not feel hatred for his enemies or love for those he protects. His homeland is an insignificant village and his countrymen will be no better off regardless of the war's outcome. It was a personal impulse rather than duty or patriotism that drove him to join the tumultuous skies. He views both his past and potential future as wasted, so his life and death achieve balance.

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    An Irish airman fighting in World War I knows that he will die in battle among the clouds. He states that he does not feel hatred for his enemies or love for those he protects. His homeland is an insignificant village and his countrymen will be no better off regardless of the war's outcome. It was a personal impulse rather than duty or patriotism that drove him to join the tumultuous skies. He views both his past and potential future as wasted, so his life and death achieve balance.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    102 views2 pages

    An Irish Airman Foresees His Death-3

    Uploaded by

    GOLDEN FIZZIK GYM
    An Irish airman fighting in World War I knows that he will die in battle among the clouds. He states that he does not feel hatred for his enemies or love for those he protects. His homeland is an insignificant village and his countrymen will be no better off regardless of the war's outcome. It was a personal impulse rather than duty or patriotism that drove him to join the tumultuous skies. He views both his past and potential future as wasted, so his life and death achieve balance.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
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    An Irish Airman foresees his Death”

    Summary

    The speaker, an Irish airman fighting in World War I, declares that he knows
    he will die fighting among the clouds. He says that he does not hate those he
    fights, nor love those he guards. His country is “Kiltartan’s Cross,” his
    countrymen “Kiltartan’s poor.” He says that no outcome in the war will make
    their lives worse or better 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” or “cheering crowds.” Rather, “a lonely impulse of delight” drove him to
    “this tumult in the clouds.” 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.”

    Form

    This short sixteen-line poem has a very simple structure: lines metered in
    iambic tetrameter, and four grouped “quatrains” of alternating rhymes:
    ABABCDCDEFEFGHGH, or four repetitions of the basic ABAB scheme
    utilizing different rhymes.

    Commentary

    This simple poem is one of Yeats’s most explicit statements about the First
    World War, and illustrates both his active political consciousness (“Those I
    fight I do not hate, / Those I guard I do not love”) and his increasing propensity
    for a kind of hard-edged mystical rapture (the airman was driven to the clouds
    by “A lonely impulse of delight”). The poem, which, like flying, emphasizes
    balance, essentially enacts a kind of accounting, whereby the airman lists
    every factor weighing upon his situation and his vision of death, and rejects
    every possible factor he believes to be false: he does not hate or love his
    enemies or his allies, his country will neither be benefited nor hurt by any
    outcome of the war, he does not fight for political or moral motives but
    because of his “impulse of delight”; his past life seems a waste, his future life
    seems that it would be a waste, and his death will balance his life.
    Complementing this kind of tragic arithmetic is the neatly balanced structure of
    the poem, with its cycles of alternating rhymes and its clipped, stoical meter.

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