6. W.B. Yeats

Irish patriotism and World War I in "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death" and "On being asked for a War Poem"

Read "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death" and "On being asked for a War Poem".

1. Introduction

Almost a half century has passed since Carroll’s Jabberwocky but poetry has changed a lot. This sixth paper opens the series of war poetry that focuses on the poets’ reaction to the conflicts they went through. Yeats saw two violent clashes: Ireland’s fight for independency and World War I. Even if he didn’t want to get involved in politics, personal circumstances led him to write some of his most well-known works.

2. About the Poet

William Butler Yeats was born on June 13, 1865, in Sandymount, County Dublin, Ireland. His father wanted to become a painter, so the family moved to London when he was only two years old. William was homeschooled and his mother taught him Irish folktales that would later be the topic of his poems, with the influence of his father’s aesthetical views. In 1876 he entered Godolphin Primary School in London, then Erasmus Smith High School when the family returned to England. He wasn’t motivated as a student and enrolled at the Metropolitan School of Art in 1884 to follow his father’s footsteps. He quit two years later, when he realized that he would rather be a poet.

The next year, Yeats went back to London and joined paranormal societies like the Golden Dawn in 1887 or the Theosophical Society in 1888. Two years later he co-founded the Rhymers Club, a group of poets that met at a pub to talk about literature. Among its members were poets like Ernest Rhys, Lord Alfred Douglas and Oscar Wilde. During the following years, Yeats published works influenced by Irish folklore and esotericism, like his second poetry collection, "The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics" in 1892.

Yeats had recently met Maud Gonne, a beautiful Irish activist with whom he fell in love. He proposed to her on many occasions but was always rejected. In 1894 he met Lady Augusta Gregory, with whom he founded the Abbey Theatre in 1899. Yeats wrote many nationalistic plays, his most successful work being "Cathleen Ní Houlihan" in 1902. He was the most important author of the Irish Literary Revival.

Yeats became greatly interested in Japanese Noh after meeting Ezra Pound in 1913 and experimented with masks and dances in his plays. Yeats refused to write about poetry, and when he did, he was ambiguous. Some of his most famous poems talked about war: "Easter 1916", "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death" and "On being asked for a War Poem".

Wishing to have children, he married George Hyde-Lees, who was twenty-seven years his junior and had two children, Anne and Michael. Yeats was appointed to the Irish Senate in 1922 and he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1923. His best works were produced in his late life: "The Second Coming" in 1920, "The Tower", which contains "Sailing to Byzantium", "Leda and the Swan" in 1928. He died on January 28, 1939, in France.

3. Irish patriotism and World War I

Ireland was under British jurisdiction since the Act of Union 1800, which merged both kingdoms into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Most Irish didn’t agree with this Act and took part in violent insurrections against British dominance.

Ireland and Britain blamed each other for several problems such as the famine that devastated Ireland, forcing thousands of families to emigrate and settle in England, Scotland, the United States, Canada and Australia.

Several leaders emerged to lead the Irish in their fight for independence, Daniel O’Connell in the first half of the century and William Smith O’Brien, leader of the Young Ireland party and one of the founders of the Irish Confederation that were responsible for the Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848, in the second half.

Another period of agrarian agitation took place during the three last decades of the 19th century. The Land War brought into conflict Protestant British landlords with Catholic Irish tenants who felt that their lands had been taken away unfairly by the British. The Irish National Land League was founded in 1878 by Michael Davitt and helped the Irish get their land back by boycotting the landlords.

All of these problems raised the question of whether Ireland should be completely independent of Great Britain. There was a division of opinions: the Liberals wanted Ireland to have their own parliament, but Conservatives and Unionists wanted to remain under British control.

New political nationalist parties appeared: the Home Rule League created by Isaac Butt and the more radical Irish Parliamentary Party founded by Charles Stewart Parnell. Unlike O’Connell, who wanted total independency, Parnell preferred self-government without leaving the United Kingdom.

The Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone tried to enact home rule bills on two occasions, in 1886 and 1893, but neither were approved. This caused the Liberal Unionist Association to split from the Liberal Party.

The Conservatives won the next elections and passed the Local Government Act of 1898, which brought an end to the British landlords tyranny. The Liberals returned to power in 1906 and six years later the third home rule bill was passed. It was to be enacted in 1914, and granted Ireland its own parliament while remaining under British jurisdiction for important issues such as foreign policies. The Unionists didn’t accept these ideas and tensions began between them and nationalist parties like Sinn Fein. A civil war was possible between conservative groups like the Ulster Volunteer Force and nationalist groups such as the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Both supported violence to achieve independency.

By then the Cultural Revival had already settled in because Irish culture was being replaced by British culture. If Ireland wanted to be an independent nation, they needed to preserve their particular culture and so they did by promoting their language, arts, literature and sports. Writers like W.B. Yeats, Lady Augusta Gregory, George Russell, Douglas Hyde, John Millington Synge and George Moore took part in the Literary Revival and collaborated together to create a new form of Irish literature. They reunited in The Abbey Theatre, a key place for proindependence theatre.

The civil war didn’t break out because the Home Rule Bill was suspended when World War I started. The Unionists and nationalists supported Ireland’s participation in the war, but radical nationalists led by Sinn Fein opposed it because it was meaningless for Ireland.

Ireland was suffering many losses and the IRB thought this was a good opportunity for a rebellion. The Germans donated weapons for the Easter Sunday 1916 uprising but they didn’t make it past British defense. The IRB and the Irish Citizen Army positioned themselves near the most important buildings in Dublin and declared a Republic. The British reacted by crushing the rebellion and executing its leaders, but this fueled the revolution as the victims became martyrs.

Sinn Fein won the 1918 elections and proclaimed the Irish Republic. The War of Independence broke out in 1919. The members of the Irish Republican Army used guerrilla tactics against the Black and Tans, and soon the war became so brutal that even civilians were tortured, raped and killed. The Fourth Home Rule Act was approved in 1920; it divided Ireland into Southern Ireland, who would be granted self-government, and Northern Ireland, who was free to join the British if they wanted. The war ended in July 1921 and in December 1921 representatives of both governments signed an Anglo-Irish Treaty that abolished the Irish Republic and made it a self-governing Dominion of the Commonwealth of Nations. The Treaty was ratified the next year and Southern Ireland became independent while Northern Ireland stayed with Great Britain.

4. Style

"An Irish Airman Foresees His Death" is a sixteen-line poem divided into four quatrains with an alternating rhyme scheme (ABABCDCDEFEFGHGH). The lines are metered in iambic tetrameter. It’s written as a soliloquy from the point of view of an Irish aviator who knows he is about to die and reflects on the meaning of war.

"On being asked for a War Poem" is a short six-line poem. Each lines has ten syllables and the poem’s rhyme scheme is ABCABC. It is written with an ironic tone.

5. Summary

In the first poem Yeats refuses to get involved in political issues regarding World War I and states that a poet should keep silent and leave those affairs in hands of the statesmen.

Some months later and due to Ireland’s unsuccessful attempt to gain independence from England and the death of some of his friends in the war, Yeats broke his silence and wrote three poems to commemorate Robert Gregory’s death in the war.

6. Analysis

"On being asked for a War Poem" was Yeats’ response to a request by the American-born writer Henry James to write a poem about his political thoughts on World War I that would be included in a book edited by Edith Wharton meant to raise funds for Belgium refugees. The poem was first written on February 6, 1915, and Yeats changed its title twice. First, it was called "To a friend who has asked me to sign his manifesto to the neutral nations", then "A Reason for Keeping Silent" when he sent it to James, and finally "On being asked for a War Poem" when it was reprinted in his collection of poems "The Wild Swans at Coole" in 1917.

Yeats thought that a poet shouldn’t talk about war, that he should "keep his mouth shut" (2) and leave military affairs to soldiers and "statesmen" (3). He felt that poetry was not meant to solve those type of conflicts and that a poet ought to focus on lighter topics that could "please/ a young girl in the indolence of her youth,/ or an old man upon a winter’s night" (4-6).

When Yeats sent the poem to James, he wrote that it "is the only thing I have written of the war or will write, so I hope it may not seem unfitting". Yeats didn’t keep his words because starting from 1916 he wrote many poems that addressed war issues. The causes of his change of mind were the failed Easter Rebellion in Dublin and the death of many friends like Robert Gregory, to whom he wrote a couple of poems after he was shot down by an Italian pilot by mistake.

The first of the three poems dedicated to Lady Gregory’s son is called "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death".

The speaker begins by saying that he knows that he is going to die "somewhere among the clouds above" (2). Having been first introduced in World War I, aircrafts became a deadly weapon for both the enemy and the men who flied it. Many airmen perished within the span of two weeks and that’s why he says that he knows he shall meet his "fate" (1). Despite his imminent death, he’s not upset about it and narrates his thoughts serenely.

He states, "Those that I fight I do not hate / Those that I guard I do not love" (3-4). With these two verses, Yeats begins to take to pieces the myth of the patriotic serviceman. The speaker is fighting for Great Britain, as many Irishmen did, but doesn’t identify with the cause, nor does he hate the German Empire he is fighting against. His country is the "Kiltartan Cross" (5), a barony in County Galway, and his people are "Kiltartan’s poor" (6), the Irish, so "no likely end could bring them loss / or leave them happier than before" (7-8). This war has neither positive or negative outcome for his people. He didn’t fight for "law", "duty", "public men" or "cheering crowds" (9-10). He didn’t feel tied to the country, nor did he care about the war or heroic receptions. His ambition is simple — he fought for the sheer joy of flying in "a lonely impulse of delight" (11).

The last four lines are especially dramatic. The speaker has already accepted his death and "balanced all, brought all to mind" (13). The results are disheartening — the speaker thinks that his life has been "a waste of breath" (15) and that his future isn’t going to be brighter. "In balance with this life", which he thought was meaningless, "this death" (16), doing something he enjoys.

7. Conclusion

Life has been tough for the Irish since the 19th century. When Home Rule was about to become a reality, World War I broke out and Britain backed off. The Irish were left disappointed and the nationalists took profit in the new chaotic situation to perpetrate violent acts against the British. Even though World War I was irrelevant to Ireland, it frustrated their plans for independency and many Irish soldiers died defending the country they were rebelling against. Yeats shows his longing for a strong Irish culture free of British impositions in his poems, even in those that talk about war.