Back to Top
AR banner
Search Tips Advanced Search
Poetry of Direct Personal Experience
Our Collection of Aviation and Military Poetry

An Irish Airman Foresees His Death
W.B. Yeats

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 men, 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.

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. (courtesy SparkNotes)

In WWll many Irishmen distinguished themselves in the RAF, including Killy Kilmartin, Paddy Finucane (youngest Wing Commander ever at 21), Paddy Forsythe of Bomber Command.


WB Yeats

WWl Fighters

  You can show you value this content by offering your dedicated research team a coffee!  
You can lay a wreath on this page to show your respect in an everlasting way.
Add us to your address book. Click here

At the going down of the sun, and in the morning we will remember them. - Laurence Binyon
All site material (except as noted elsewhere) is © 2012 - 2025 Aircrew Remembered and owned or managed by us
and should not be used without prior permission.
 • Last Modified: 23 May 2015, 15:56