Analysis Of An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

While editing the Oxford Book of Modern Poetry (1936), William Yeats made an extremely notorious choice of omitting all of the poetry about combat experience including poems by Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. He made this decision after setting the goal of including “all good poets who have lived or died from three years before the death of Tennyson to the present moment.” While explaining his reasoning for this decision in the preface to this great anthology, Yeats explained, “passive suffering is not a theme for poetry.” In his preface, he creates a paradoxical injunction saying that all skill is joyful, even if that skill leads you to suffer. People should not focus on the tragedies that are happening and suffering shouldn’t be completely passive. He takes an extremely aesthetic view on suffering—eliciting the suffering is beautiful and …show more content…
The speaker states, “I know that I shall meet my fate” (1). The first line of this poem seems to be out of place, as it doesn’t fall in line with iambic tetrameter. The words “I know” are considered a spondee in which Yeats emphasizes that Major Gregory knows he will die, it is certain, not a possibility. However, he soon chooses to move past the topic of death because “passive suffering” is not the theme of this poem nor should it be the theme of any poem. The statement that the airman will die is very objective and matter-of-fact—Yeats does not want to focus on the sadness and death of this man but more so the passion that he felt while flying. He focuses on the aesthetic view of the death of this man, showing that he died doing what he loved and therefore his death should not be dwelled