The Pessimistic W. B. Yeats’ in An Irish Airman Foresees His Death Essa

The Pessimistic W. B. Yeats in An Irish Airman Foresees His Death There are countless manners in which a individual can mourn the death of another. Some become engulfed in a state of rage, while others may feel a calm, quiet grief or pity. Some place blame on others for the loss while trying to discover a reason for death. Others may roll several emotions into one oversized mourning process that includes several stages. In An Irish Airman Foresees His Death, W. B. Yeats grieves the death of Major Robert Gregory, son of Lady Gregory, by providing the bank clerk with an overwhelming sense of stillness toward life. The poem provides a variety of emotions that counter each other to produce a balance that is uniquely pessimistic. The first-person narrator, presumably the voice of Robert Gregory, allows the reader to connect more easily with the thoughts of Yeats. If the poem were written in the third person, the personal emotions would have been lost. Illustrating a death in the voi ce of the dead adds sorrow and truth to the work, as an outside narrator would seem more distant from the feelings involved. Yeats may have chosen to express his words through the narrators voice as a tribute to Robert Gregory, or because of his friendship with Lady Gregoryor simply because doing so brought him closer to the emotions of the situation in general. In the final three lines of the poem, the narrator gives the sense that, because of death, there is little value in life. He says that the years to come seemed waste of breath, / a waste of breath the years behind (14-15). such(prenominal) thoughts suggest existentialism, which provides a sense of the lack of meaning or purpose in livingthat we simply exist. Yet the opening lines... ... when going into battle, and, ultimately, death (11). This is not to say he feels delight in dying, but that some sense of delight in going to war him brought him there, via combat. Taken as a whole, An Irish Airman Foresees His Death is a simple poem about a man dying. Its intricacies lie in the juggling act performed by the narrator that leads to a pessimistic, balanced view of a soldiers death. When each line is considered carefully, the work becomes more and more complicated. Several emotions are contrasted along the waymayhap an attempt by Yeats to capture the multitude of feelings that must run through the mind of someone dying. Works Cited Yeats, William Butler. An Irish Airman Foresees His Death. The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. Ed. Richard Ellmann and Robert OClair. reinvigorated York W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 154-155.