An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

William Butler Yeats, published 1919

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 law, nor duty bade me fight,

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.

Many people take this poem as an example of Yeats’s powerful gifts of imagination and imagery, and his ability to bring modern events into classical poetic forms. But there actually was a real Irish Airman on the poet’s mind: Robert Gregory served with the Royal Air Force Flying Corps and was killed on the Italian front in 1917. Like Yeats, Gregory came from the wealthy Anglo-Irish gentry; his mother was a friend of the poet. This is the one that is best remembered, but Yeats actually wrote several poems about Gregory’s loss; In Memory of Robert Gregory is, after An Irish Airman, the one that is most critically admired. It uses a number of literary devices but then comes back to Yeats’s assessment of Gregory, the man:

Soldier, scholar, horseman, he,

And all he did done perfectly

As though he had but that one trade alone.

Gregory was a tragic figure. A 19-victory ace, at least according to Yeats, he had received the Military Cross and the French Legion d’Honneur, and was appointed to the command of 66 Squadron, RFC. Unbeknownst to Yeats, when he was shot down and killed on 23 January 1918, he fell not at the hands of a German or Austro-Hungarian enemy but either as a result of friendly fire from a mistaken Italian ally, or otherwise accidentally (the records are not clear).

Many fans of English poetry, especially Great War poetry, know An Irish Airman Forsees His Death. Break it down into quatrains and it’s easy to memorize, a great party trick — at least, with English Lit coeds. But relatively few of them can name the Irish Airman. Now you can.

Use your knowledge wisely.

Owen, a British officer, composed poetry in the final year of his life, 1917-1918. He seems to have begun writing in earnest whilst confined at Craiglockhart Hospital in Edinburgh with “neurasthenia,” aka shell-shock (or as we say today, PTSD). He had become a pacifist by his experience of war, and through his deep Christian faith. But after meeting Siegfied Sassoon, a war hero who wound up in Craiglockhart after disrupting Parliament with a pacifist demonstration, Owen formed the idea that he “must get some reputation for gallantry before I could… declare my principles.”

He returned to the Front in September 1918, telling his brother, “”I know I shall be killed. But it’s the only place I can make my protest from.” His statement was prescient: Owen, the Christian turned warrior to secure a platform from which to redeclare his Christian pacifism, quickly established a reputation for bravery, but was shot and killed on 4 November 1918, a mere week before the Armistice.  The site War Poetry UK calls him “The greatest of the war poets who have written in the English language,” which is all the more remarkable for his very short span of work, and the few poem he wrote (perhaps thirty in all), of which only five were published before the end of the war, three anonymously. His letters are quite as engaging, and as poetic in their language as anyone else’s self conscious poetry. He wrote to Sasson, enroute to the front: “This is what the shells scream at me every time: ‘Haven’t you got the wits to keep out of this?’”  

The death of Owen, the brief flash of his talent, is a microcosm of the loss to humanity that was the First World War. While he is best remembered for the bitter “Dulce et Decorum est,” this less-known poem is presented for your consideration. -Ed.

Arms and the Boy

We shan’t say much about the poem itself, except that the alliteration/consonance/vowel-shift rhyme scheme (the specific term for which appears to be “pararhyme”) is unusual and vaguely disturbing, and that the poem was likely inspired by (or contrapuntal to) Sassoon’s The Kiss, which we discussed back in 2013. -Ed.

As these have been received rather well, let’s reach back across a century-plus to 1902, when Hardy was writing about the Boer War, which he (as most liberals of the day) opposed as, shall we say, an excess of the Empire. (In the United States, at the time, sympathies were also largely with the Boers as well).

The British defeated the much smaller (although equipped with higher quality arms at the squad and company level) forces of the Afrikaner settlers, only to find their foes continuing a shadow guerrilla war — which Britain then suppressed, effectively, with absolute ruthlessness. But this poem refers to the earlier, uniformed-units-on-units phase of the war, and, indeed, Hardy does what he can to universalize his sentiment.

The Man He Killed

Had he and I but met

            By some old ancient inn,

We should have sat us down to wet

            Right many a nipperkin!

            But ranged as infantry,

            And staring face to face,

I shot at him as he at me,

            And killed him in his place.

            I shot him dead because —

            Because he was my foe,

Just so: my foe of course he was;

            That’s clear enough; although

            He thought he’d ‘list, perhaps,

            Off-hand like — just as I —

Was out of work — had sold his traps —

            No other reason why.

            Yes; quaint and curious war is!

            You shoot a fellow down

You’d treat if met where any bar is,

            Or help to half-a-crown.”

This memorial at Crewe, England, is typical of memorials that served as cenotaphs for fallen soldiers whose names were not repatriated — like Drummer Hodge.

We’ve been planning to write something about President-elect Trump’s selections for national security posts and how they compare to the incumbents and recently departed individuals who warmed those chairs during the Obama and Bush administrations, but as of press time for this post (Monday night) he hadn’t named any names.

So instead, we go back to Thomas Hardy. We knew him as a novelist (Tess of the d’Urbervilles; Jude the Obscure), and only when we published a WWI (actually, barely pre-WWI) poem of his did we bother to look him up and learn he is better regarded in English Lit circles for his poetry — or was, before English Lit became the propaganda arm of the Great Buggernaut, in which only race, sex and social justice count, and Hardy is dismissed as a deceased cismale heteronormative cryptofascist, because white.

That’s why you’ll never see a poem like this brief lament of the short life and solitary death of the eponymous Drummer Hodge out of the current crop of would-be literati. Fortunately, Hardy’s stuff, like many others more talented than the post-talent postmoderns, has been written down for our reading pleasure.

They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest

Uncoffined — just as found:

His landmark is a kopje-crest

That breaks the veldt around:

And foreign constellations west

Each night above his mound.

Young Hodge the drummer never knew —

Fresh from his Wessex home —

The meaning of the broad Karoo,

The Bush, the dusty loam,

And why uprose to nightly view

Strange stars amid the gloam.

Yet portion of that unknown plain

Will Hodge for ever be;

His homely Northern breast and brain

Grow to some Southern tree,

And strange-eyed constellations reign

His stars eternally.

This memorial to the dead was erected at Kimberley, site of a long siege.

Hardy here is writing about the then-current Boer War. His vocabulary contrasts “homely” England — “Wessex” was his fictional county used in many works, named for an ancient kingdom, which he overlaid on the topography of rural Dorset where he was born, lived and died — with “strange” South African words: karoo, kopje, veldt, just as informed Britons learned these words in dispatches from war correspondents.

There is no poem this good that was published in a literary poetry magazine this year. Or last year. For all practical purposes, English language poetry is a dead art. Yet, in its grave, “uncoffined; just as found,” poetry from a golden age still sings…

…if one cares to listen.

For the “military post” hour today (it will actually be up some minutes late), we dig into our spotty repository of World War I poetry, to offer up a piece, not by some young officer at the Front, but by one of Britain’s top men of letters, Thomas Hardy. (And here we always thought of him as a 19th Century guy. He was in his seventies as he wrote this and would live more than 10 more years). (Edited to add: this poem was actually written before the war, and he really was, as is mentioned, complaining about a Royal Navy exercise. We had forgotten that). 

                       Channel Firing

That night your great guns, unawares,

Shook all our coffins as we lay,

And broke the chancel window-squares,

We thought it was the Judgement-day

And sat upright. While drearisome

Arose the howl of wakened hounds:

The mouse let fall the altar-crumb,

The worm drew back into the mounds,

The glebe cow drooled. Till God cried, “No;

It’s gunnery practice out at sea

Just as before you went below;

The world is as it used to be:

“All nations striving strong to make

Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters

They do no more for Christés sake

Than you who are helpless in such matters.

“That this is not the judgment-hour

For some of them’s a blessed thing,

For if it were they’d have to scour

Hell’s floor for so much threatening. . . .

“Ha, ha. It will be warmer when

I blow the trumpet (if indeed

I ever do; for you are men,

And rest eternal sorely need).”

So down we lay again. “I wonder,

Will the world ever saner be,”

Said one, “than when He sent us under

In our indifferent century!”

And many a skeleton shook his head.

“Instead of preaching forty year,”

My neighbour Parson Thirdly said,

“I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer.”

Again the guns disturbed the hour,

Roaring their readiness to avenge,

As far inland as Stourton Tower,

And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.

There is more going on in this poem than seems at first glance. At first, it condemns the madness of the war, and the madness of the men that undertake it — hardly an unusual theme. But the device Hardy chooses, of having the old dead themselves condemn war, and not only them, but God Himself — that’s why he’s one of the Dead White Males people read, and your Grand-Uncle Nigel is not.

“That this is not the judgment hour [is] for some of them a blessed thing,” speaks the deity. It is not coincidental that the guns that wake the dead — an image that is grown from an ancient English expression itself — break the windows not in the house, but in the “chancel,” a word which many will associate vaguely with church but which particularly means the part of a Christian church around the altar; where the priest conducts Mass. (It is elevated above the pews of the parishioners, like a theater stage). The windows here are not simple portals to the outdoors, but usually crafted by the architect to shine light on the altar (the chancel is traditionally the east, sunrise side of the church), and filled with stained-glass decorative art, usually depicting some uplifting sermon, such as Christ’s ascent into heaven.

The poem’s structure and rhyme scheme is simple, its words — apart from chancel and some iconic English place names — consciously basic and Anglo-Saxon.  This makes it very accessible to all classes and all educations, easily memorized, and yet, it rewards some careful study, if you care to try.