The Full Text of “An Irish Airman Foresees his Death”
1I know that I shall meet my fate
2Somewhere among the clouds above;
3Those that I fight I do not hate,
4Those that I guard I do not love;
5My country is Kiltartan Cross,
6My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
7No likely end could bring them loss
8Or leave them happier than before.
9Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
10Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
11A lonely impulse of delight
12Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
13I balanced all, brought all to mind,
14The years to come seemed waste of breath,
15A waste of breath the years behind
16In balance with this life, this death.
The Full Text of “An Irish Airman Foresees his Death”
1I know that I shall meet my fate
2Somewhere among the clouds above;
3Those that I fight I do not hate,
4Those that I guard I do not love;
5My country is Kiltartan Cross,
6My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
7No likely end could bring them loss
8Or leave them happier than before.
9Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
10Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
11A lonely impulse of delight
12Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
13I balanced all, brought all to mind,
14The years to come seemed waste of breath,
15A waste of breath the years behind
16In balance with this life, this death.
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“An Irish Airman Foresees his Death” Introduction
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“An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” was written by the Irish poet W.B. Yeats in 1918. Told from the perspective of an Irish fighter pilot in World War I, the poem is critical of both the war in general and specifically of British rule over Ireland (which lasted until 1922). The speaker argues that the outcome of the war is ultimately meaningless for his small community in western Ireland, and that he feels no hatred towards his enemies nor love for the British. He pursues the dangerous pleasure of airborne combat not out of duty or patriotism, and is instead driven only by a "lonely impulse of delight." 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.
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“An Irish Airman Foresees his Death” Summary
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I know that I will die somewhere up in the clouds. I don’t hate the people that I’m fighting against—and I don’t love the people that I’m fighting for. I’m from the countryside around Kiltartan Church in Ireland, and my people are the poor folk in that area. Regardless of the outcome of this war, they won’t feel any worse or any better than they do now. I didn’t decide to fight because of law or duty; I wasn’t encouraged by the politicians or the cheers of the crowd. I was driven to this fight in the sky by the sheer delight and loneliness of it. I weighed everything, thought it all through. The years ahead of me seemed like a waste of breath and so did the years behind me—in comparison to this way of living and dying.
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“An Irish Airman Foresees his Death” Themes
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War and Death
This is not a poem about heroism or patriotic fervor—though it could be: as a fighter pilot in World War I, its speaker certainly is brave, even heroic. But he isn’t motivated by a love of country or a desire to protect his fellow citizens, and nor does he risk his life to win honor or glory. Instead, the speaker flies into battle because he feels like the sheer pleasure and exhilaration of flying are the best that he can hope for in his life. The poem thus breaks with many of the traditions of war poetry. Instead of celebrating the speaker’s heroism and courage, the poem meditates on the senselessness of war and the futility of patriotism.
The speaker is well aware of the dangers he faces as he flies into battle. In fact, he is sure that he will die. But his sacrifice is not motivated by a desire to protect his fellow citizens. As he says in line 4, “Those that I guard I do not love.” Nor is his sacrifice motivated by political feelings. As he says in line 3, “Those that I fight I do not hate.” Later he insists that he was not motivated by politicians or “cheering crowds,” full of patriotic fervor. Indeed, for the speaker and his countrymen, the outcome of the war doesn’t really matter at all! It doesn’t matter whether they win or lose, the speaker says, because either outcome won’t “leave them happier than before.”
The speaker systematically dismisses all the reasons why people usually go to war. He isn’t fighting for honor, for country, or even because he cares who wins. Readers might wonder, then, why the speaker bothers fighting at all. The speaker’s answer to this is surprising. He fights simply for the sheer emotion of it—the sense of exhilaration it gives him. He is driven, he says, by “a lonely impulse of delight.” Nothing else in his life seems worth pursuing: both his past and his future seem to him to be a “waste of breath.” In other words, he regards his life as pointless, so he is willing to sacrifice it for this dangerous “delight.”
The speaker of “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” thus comes across as very pessimistic. He can picture his death, but he doesn’t seem particularly troubled by it. He doesn’t resist it; he doesn’t fight to save his own life. And he doesn’t strive to make his life—or his death—meaningful. He isn’t interested in winning glory, or in making the lives of his fellow citizens better—and, in fact, he seems fairly certain that his death won’t change anything for him or for them. Instead, he seeks a transitory and dangerous pleasure—arguing that it’s the best thing he can hope for in life.
In doing so the speaker offers a forceful critique of war itself, which he suggests is pointless. And he also critiques the patriotic fervor of those who support the war—suggesting that they are distant from and ignorant of the realities of the soldiers who fight it. In this way, "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death" not only breaks from the traditions of war poetry; it also criticizes war itself.
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Irish Identity and British War
The speaker of “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” knows that he will die in battle, but he doesn’t really seem to care. He also knows that his death won’t change the lives of his countrymen, for better or for worse. The poem offers a subtle, implicit reason for this pessimism: the speaker is an “Irish Airman,” fighting in World War I. In other words, he’s fighting on behalf of Britain—which, at the time the poem was written, ruled Ireland in a brutal and oppressive fashion. The speaker’s pessimism is thus intended as a sharp criticism of British rule. In the absence of Irish political freedom, the speaker suggests, his life is meaningless.
Though the poem never explicitly critiques British rule, it does implicitly highlight the suffering and poverty of Irish people living under it. When the speaker describes his “countrymen,” for instance, he calls them “Kiltartan’s poor.” Kiltartan is a region in County Galway, on the western coast of Ireland. Calling them “Kiltartan’s poor,” the speaker defines his “countrymen” in two ways: through their poverty and through their connection to the country where they live, to Ireland itself, with its rural churches and small communities.
The speaker is then quick to note that Britain’s participation in World War I won’t help lift these people out of poverty. If the British win, he says, it won’t make “Kiltartan’s poor” any “happier than before”; if they lose, that won’t “bring them loss.” In other words, the speaker quietly accuses the British of neglecting the Irish. Instead of working to make the lives of their Irish subjects better, the British invest their time and resources in big projects like World War I—projects that don’t matter to the speaker or his countrymen. And, worse, the British ask Irishmen like the speaker to fight and die in the war—even though it has no bearing on their lives.
In this context, the speaker’s pessimism about his own life seems political: it is a pointed critique of life under British rule. For the speaker, that life isn’t really much of a life at all. The speaker goes so far as to refer to it as a “waste of breath.” And, the speaker says, that’s true of the past, and it’s also true of the future, “the years to come” and “the years behind.” Even if he survives the war, the speaker doesn’t imagine that his life will take on meaning; it won’t become rich, pleasurable, or rewarding. After all, as he has already argued, the war isn’t going to change his life or the lives of his countrymen. In this sense, the speaker’s pessimism subtly indicts British rule, suggesting that it has rendered his life so pointless that his only recourse is to seek the suicidal pleasure of fighting in a war he doesn’t even support. British rule has rendered his life—and the lives of his countrymen—meaningless.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “An Irish Airman Foresees his Death”
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Lines 1-4
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;The first four lines of “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” establish the poem’s themes and its form. The speaker of the poem is an Irish fighter pilot, fighting on the side of the British in World War I. He opens the poem with a surprising declaration: he knows that he will die in battle. He doesn’t know when or where, just that it will happen “somewhere among the clouds above”—in other words, somewhere in the sky.
Because the poem was written in memory of a real Irish fighter pilot who died during World War I, Major Robert Gregory, it is often considered an elegy—one of several Yeats wrote for the young pilot. However, it breaks with many of the traditions of the elegy as a genre. This is already evident in the first four lines—after all, here the speaker is elegizing himself, before he's even died!
Lines 3-4 are even more startling. Calmly, almost casually, the speaker tells the reader that he doesn’t “hate” the people that he fights. Nor does he “love” the people that he fights for—that he “guards.” The two lines are parallel in construction: they exactly have the same grammatical structure. The parallelism stresses the speaker’s indifference: he doesn’t care about either his enemies or his friends. And that raises questions about the speaker’s motivations. The reader might wonder why the speaker is willing to die in battle if he’s so indifferent, if he isn’t motivated by the usual things that drive soldiers into battle—like love of country, fear of an enemy, patriotism, etc.
The speaker of "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death" is confronting something potentially very scary—his own death. But, for the most part, he is calm, confident, and collected. That confidence is reflected in the poem’s form. It is a single, 16-line stanza written in iambic tetrameter, a meter that follows a da DUM rhythm, with four feet per line. It can be divided into four rhyming quatrains, with an ABAB rhyme scheme. In both its meter and its rhyme scheme, the poem is very smooth and controlled. It has few metrical substitutions; it uses perfect rhymes throughout. Although the speaker is confronting his own death, he remains calm and controlled—even indifferent to it.
Or at least, that’s how things appear on the surface. The poem gives a couple of hints that the speaker isn’t quite as indifferent as he pretends to be. Those hints appear in moments where the poem deviates from its usual patterns, when the speaker breaks his own rhetorical and poetic habits. There are two good examples of such breaks in the poem’s first four lines. Note that the poem is highly end-stopped; the speaker uses only four enjambments in the whole poem. One of those enjambments appears in the poem’s first line—where the speaker is talking about his own death.
And note the way that he talks about death. Although the speaker generally avoids metaphor, speaking in direct, straightforward sentences, he uses a metaphor in line 1. Instead of saying directly that he will die, he uses a euphemism, saying that he will “meet [his] fate.” Contemplating his own death causes the speaker to break his habits, slipping—briefly—into metaphor and enjambment. These subtle changes suggest a lingering sense of anxiety that runs beneath his otherwise controlled, confident poem.
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Lines 5-8
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before. -
Lines 9-12
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds; -
Lines 13-16
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.
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“An Irish Airman Foresees his Death” Symbols
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Cheering Crowds
In line 10, the speaker says that he wasn’t motivated to fight by “cheering crowds.” Here, “cheering crowds” is a symbol for patriotism.
The “crowds” are “cheering” in support of the war; their energy and enthusiasm come from their love for their country. (And it presumably also comes from the “public men”—in other words, politicians—who have been riling them up.) The "cheering crowds" support the war—and go to fight in it—because doing so is a way of expressing their conviction and support for the nation. The speaker, however, doesn’t share that passion or conviction; this symbol makes it clear that his decision to fight isn’t motivated by patriotism. Indeed, throughout the poem the speaker quietly critiques patriotism itself, suggesting that it is an empty reason to fight.
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“An Irish Airman Foresees his Death” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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End-Stopped Line
“An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” contains a lot of end-stopped lines. Indeed, 12 of the poem’s 16 lines—three quarters of the poem—are end-stopped. The end-stops reflect the speaker’s confidence and certainty as he confronts death, and they also help underline his indifference with regard to his own fate.
The reader can see the speaker's confidence at work In lines 3-4:
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;Both lines are end-stopped. This makes them feel firm and definite. The speaker doesn’t seem to have any doubts about his feelings toward his enemies or his countrymen. He is neither filled with hatred toward his enemies nor is he filled with love for his fellow citizens.
In line 14, the speaker turns to end-stop to underscore his indifference about his own life:
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
Once again, the line is end-stopped. This is striking. After all, the speaker doesn’t really know what will happen in the future—there’s at least the possibility that the rest of his life won’t be a “waste of breath.” But the speaker doesn’t entertain that possibility. He has no doubt that the rest of his life will be meaningless. The end-stopped line contributes to that sense of certainty. Using such firm, definite end-stopped lines throughout the poem, the speaker emphasizes his certainty and confidence—even as he confronts his own death.
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Enjambment
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Alliteration
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Assonance
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Consonance
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Metaphor
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Repetition
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Caesura
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Chiasmus
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"An Irish Airman Foresees his Death" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Fate
- Guard
- Kiltartan Cross
- Kiltartan's Poor
- End
- Bade
- Public Men
- Tumult
- Balanced
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Death. The speaker is saying that he will die while flying an airplane in the war.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “An Irish Airman Foresees his Death”
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Form
“An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” is an elegy. It memorializes the life of an unnamed “Irish Airman,” who predicts his own death in combat. Though the poem itself doesn't identify the airman, it was written to memorialize the death of Major Robert Gregory, an Irish pilot—and the son of one of W.B. Yeats’s personal friends—who died in Italy during the war.
Elegies don’t have a set form: there’s no specific meter or rhyme scheme that elegies are supposed to use. So Yeats invents his own form for “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death.” The poem is a single 16-line stanza, and it is written in four rhyming quatrains. Its meter is iambic tetrameter. The poem is thus fairly traditional. Although it was written during a time of heady poetic innovation, it maintains an allegiance to traditional poetic forms. This helps to give the poem a timeless feel—even though it is about a specific time and place.
Although elegies don’t follow a set form, they do often have a standard narrative. Elegies tend to start with mourning—their speakers are in deep grief for the death of someone important. And they move from that grief toward consolation: by the end of the poem, the speaker has often found a reason to be hopeful again. In many elegies, like Milton’s “Lycidas,” this consolation is religious: the speaker remembers that the person he or she loved and lost will enjoy a better life in heaven.
In contrast, “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” lacks this traditional form of consolation. The speaker never says, for instance, that he hopes for a better life in heaven. If there is any consolation at all, it comes in the “lonely impulse of delight” the speaker feels as he flies his plane. In other words, the very thing that brings him consolation is the thing that will kill him. The poem thus breaks with the traditions of the elegy form in multiple ways. First, the speaker elegizes himself—he’s both the speaker and the person whom the speaker grieves. And second, the poem never arrives at a strong consolation or a satisfying compensation for the speaker’s death.
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Meter
“An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” is written in iambic tetrameter. Iambic tetrameter has a "da DUM" rhythm, with four feet per line. Readers can hear this steady rhythm in the poem’s first line:
I know | that I | shall meet | my fate
The poem follows this meter carefully. It contains few metrical substitutions, and those few substitutions don’t upset the poem’s rhythm. This in itself is notable. Even though the speaker is describing something which might be very upsetting—his own death—he remains calm and confident, effortlessly controlling the meter for 16 lines. The speaker’s sense of control and resolution is thus evident in the poem’s meter.
The poem’s use of iambic tetrameter also echoes some of the poem’s themes. Traditionally, poets writing in English use iambic pentameter for poems about war and heroism. By contrast, they use iambic tetrameter for lighter, less serious poems. Yeats’s decision to write the poem in iambic tetrameter (rather than pentameter) thus reflects and echoes the speaker’s own relationship to heroism—and to the traditions of war poetry. The speaker doesn’t see himself as a hero and doesn’t celebrate his own bravery—and neither does the poem. By using iambic tetrameter, then, the poem quietly signals its resistance to the way that poets typically write about war, and the speaker quietly emphasizes his resistance to being labeled a hero.
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Rhyme Scheme
“An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” is written in a single 16-line stanza. That stanza can be divided into four quatrains, each of which follows the same basic rhyme scheme:
ABAB
The poem uses simple, direct rhymes: with the exception of "above" in line 2, "before" in line 8, “delight” in line 11, and "behind" in line 16, all of its rhyme words are one syllable. And the poem’s rhymes are all perfect rhymes—the speaker never uses weaker forms of rhyme, like slant rhyme. So the poem’s rhyme scheme suggests something important about the speaker: even though he is facing death, he is calm and composed, perfectly in control of his poem. The skill and ease of the poem’s rhymes suggest that the speaker isn’t particularly afraid of death—he isn’t troubled by the knowledge that he will die in battle. The reader can hear this confidence in the poem’s final rhyme, between “breath” and “death”:
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.The speaker is delving into some tough material here: he not only acknowledges that he will die, but he also admits that his own life seems meaningless to him. The rhyme links the two ideas together more closely, suggesting that he doesn’t mind “this death” because his past and future are a “waste of breath.” But despite all that, his rhymes remain calm, assured, and straightforward. The poem’s rhyme scheme is unruffled by the complex and difficult subjects the poem addresses. Instead, it reflects the speaker’s confidence—and perhaps more importantly, the indifference he feels as he confronts his own death.
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“An Irish Airman Foresees his Death” Speaker
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The speaker of “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” is an Irish fighter pilot in World War I. The poem is based on the life and death of a real pilot, Major Robert Gregory, who flew with the British Air Force and died during World War I. Gregory was the son of one Yeats’s friends and the poem was written as an elegy for him, which is why this guide uses masculine pronouns to refer to the speaker. However, the poem itself doesn’t name Gregory or any of the specific details surrounding his life and death.
Instead, the poem’s speaker is anonymous. He is defined not by his family or his personal history. Instead, the poem focuses on his relationship to the place where he’s from—County Galway, on Ireland’s west coast—and the “poor” people who live there. He seems to identify strongly as an Irishman, and so he doesn’t love his role as a fighter pilot, fighting in a war on behalf of England—the country that, at the time the poem was written, ruled Ireland in an oppressive fashion. He feels sure the war won’t improve the lives of his countrymen. Indeed, he regards his own life as meaningless and devoid of pleasure. As a result, the speaker is pessimistic, resigned to his fate—and critical of the war he fights in.
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“An Irish Airman Foresees his Death” Setting
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“An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” is set during World War I, a major conflict in Europe that lasted from 1914-1919. The poem is not specific about exactly when or where it happens. One might imagine the speaker as a new recruit, meditating on the dangers ahead of him, or as an experienced pilot, stationed at the front.
Instead of focusing on the details of the war—and the speaker’s place in it—the poem reserves its most telling details to describe the place the speaker is from. He describes himself as an Irishman, from “Kiltartan Cross”—a poor, rural region on the west coast of Ireland. At the heart of the poem, then, is an irony: the speaker is an Irish pilot fighting on behalf of the British—the country which ruled Ireland at the time the poem was written, often in a repressive fashion. The poem focuses on this tension because, for the speaker, Britain's oppression of his poor Irish countrymen is more important than the particular details of where he’s stationed or even who he’s fighting against. As he announces in line 7, no “likely end” of the war will improve—or worsen—the lives of his countrymen: the war itself is irrelevant to him and to them.
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Literary and Historical Context of “An Irish Airman Foresees his Death”
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Literary Context
“An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” was written at the height of a literary movement called modernism. Modernism was a response to rapid changes in European and American society at the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th: the sudden shift to an economy organized around urban industry instead of agriculture. The modernists responded to these societal changes by trying to develop new literary forms—literary forms capable of capturing such transformations.
Yeats had a complicated relationship with the modernists. Though he is often considered a modernist—and was championed by key figures in the movement, like Ezra Pound—he remained invested in traditional poetic techniques, like meter and rhyme. “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” is a good example of this fraught relationship with modernism. The poem is an elegy: it was written in memory of Major Robert Gregory, an Irish fighter pilot and the son of Lady Gregory, a close friend of W.B. Yeats. (Indeed, Yeats wrote several poems memorializing Robert Gregory’s death). The poem refuses many of the conventions and standards of the elegy—a move that aligns it with modernism and modernist experiments with new forms and genres. At the same time, however, the poem is written in rhyming iambic tetrameter quatrains, a conventional form. The poem thus has complicated literary commitments: at once innovative and conservative, modern and traditional.
Historical Context
“An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” was written in 1918—though Yeats waited to publish it until after World War I ended in 1919. He was afraid the poem was too critical of the war—perhaps rightly so: the poem offers a sharp critique of the way Britain uses Irish soldiers to fight its wars, while oppressing them at home.
World War I was a major conflict that lasted from 1914-1919. During the war, European powers like Britain and France fought against Germany and its allies. Though the war began with optimism and enthusiasm on both sides, it quickly ground into a brutal stalemate. It was the first truly modern war, and involved casualties on a level never before seen. At major battles like Verdun, hundreds of thousands of soldiers on both sides lost their lives. Both sides used new technologies—like airplanes and mustard gas—to terrorize their enemies. The war was so brutal that it caused many people to question the value and integrity of Western civilization.
Irish soldiers fought in World War I on the side of the British, but at the time the war was fought, England governed Ireland as a colony—and had done so since the 17th century. For many Irish people—in particular Irish Catholics—British rule was violent and oppressive. And for many Irish soldiers, it was difficult to see how the conflicts at the heart of the First World War related to their plight: the poverty and oppression they endured at home. For the speaker of the poem, that oppression is so severe that it makes his life—and his death—feel meaningless.
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More “An Irish Airman Foresees his Death” Resources
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External Resources
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W.B. Yeats Reads "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death" — The poet recites "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death."
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W. B. Yeats's Biography — A detailed biography of Yeats from the Poetry Foundation.
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Blake Morrison on "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death." — The contemporary Irish poet Blake Morrison reflects on "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death."
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Background Info — Connie Ruzich provides detailed background on "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death."
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Major Robert Gregory — An article on the life of Major Robert Gregory, the Irish pilot memorialized by W.B. Yeats in "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death."
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LitCharts on Other Poems by William Butler Yeats
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