An Irish Airman

Major Robert Gregory

On January 23, 1918, an Irish pilot and recipient of the Military Cross was killed when his plane fell from the sky over Padua, Italy.  The airman was Major Robert Gregory, remembered by W.B. Yeats in his poem “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death.” Gregory was the only son of Lady Augusta Gregory, playwright and close friend of W.B. Yeats, and it was at Lady Gregory’s urging that Yeats wrote in memory of her son.  

An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

Recruiting poster,
published in Dublin

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.

            —W.B. Yeats

Yeats’ poem for Gregory presents a solitary pilot, haunted by the vision not only of his death, but also of his past and his future (“ a waste of breath”).  Alone in the clouds, the airman distances himself from both the political turmoil of the Great War and the struggle for Irish independence; he is driven instead by a “lonely impulse of delight.”  What anchors him to this world are local, personal concerns: a small town in Galway and its impoverished people.

Old Kiltartan Church and Graveyard, photo by Tony O'Neill 

Yeats’ poem idealizes Robert Gregory as a man who refuses to be categorized as a war hero, yet the reality of Gregory’s motivations are more complex. Personal diary entries from 1915 suggest that one of the reasons he joined the war was to escape the family turmoil caused by his adulterous affair with another woman.  In 1915 at the age of 34, married and with three young children, Gregory enlisted with the Connaught Rangers, transferring that same year to the British Royal Flying Corps, “at a time when the average life expectancy for new combat pilots had been estimated at only three weeks.”*

Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Robert Gregory
photo by W.E. Bailey, courtesy of Colin Smythe

And for what did Gregory die? Yeats’ poem suggests the Gregory’s life was sacrificed to the wastefulness of war—that no matter how he died, his sacrifice would not significantly alter his country’s future. Official military records in the British National Archives report that Gregory’s death was an accident of friendly fire, that he was “shot down in error by an Italian pilot.”** Lady Gregory provides yet another account; writing to a friend several days after her son’s death, she states that Robert was returning from a flight over enemy territory, “when at a great height they believe he fainted and did not come back to consciousness in this world.”** Most recently, Geoffrey O’Byrne-White, a Gregory descendant and director of the Irish Aviation authority, has argued that Gregory lost consciousness and crashed due to an adverse reaction to the Spanish flu vaccine that he had received on the morning of his last flight. O’Byrne-White argues that “strict wartime censorship suppressed any references to the worsening Spanish flu pandemic or possible faulty inoculations and that this may also explain why Major Gregory’s death was attributed to so-called friendly fire in the records of the Royal Flying Corps.”**

Gregory's grave, Padua, Italy

“An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” highlights the complexities of the Great War and modern memory: simple narratives of heroism often smooth over contradictory details. Recent editorials in Irish newspapers have argued that despite the 40,000 Irishmen killed in the First World War (compared to 1,400 in the Irish War of Independence and several thousand in the Irish Civil War), “until recently, Irish participation in the Great War was airbrushed out—except in Northern Ireland.”†

Also frequently erased from the history of the war are accounts of the Spanish flu, a disease not created by the war, but weaponized and spread by it, a pandemic that “killed at least eight times more people than the war did, accumulating an estimated eighty million deaths worldwide between 1919 and early 1920.”††

  

Yeats’ poem for Major Robert Gregory is remarkable both for what it reveals and what it obscures. The poem reminds us that Irish history, the Great War, as well as the life and death of Robert Gregory are all complex realities: tangled, disputed, and defying easy interpretation. 

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* James Pethica, “Yeats’s ‘perfect man,’” Dublin Review, vol. 35, Summer 2009, thedublinreview.com/article/yeatss-perfect-man/.

** Ray Burke, “Challenge to official accounts of Gregory death in WWI,” RTÉ, 6 Jan. 2018, http://www.rte.ie/news/analysis-and-comment/2018/0101/930446-robert-gregory. 

† Sean Farrell, “It’s a long way to Tipperary: Two books on Irish participation in WW1,” Irish Independent, 14 Dec. 2014, www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/book-reviews/its-a-long-way-to-tipperary-two-books-on-irish-participation-in-ww1-30824693.html. 

†† Jane Elizabeth Fisher,“Teaching the 1918 Influenza Pandemic as Part of a World War I Curriculum,” Teaching Representations of the First World War, edited by Debra Rae Cohen and Douglas Higbee, MLA, 2017, p. 193.

A poet's silence

In the late summer of 1970 in response to the war in Vietnam, Edwin Starr topped the Billboard charts, singing "War-- huh yeah, What is it good for? Absolutely nothing."

Sixty-five years before "War" topped the music charts, W.B. Yeats wrote a challenging short poem about war that asked, "War poetry – what is it good for?" 

Henry Allingham, WWI veteran

On being asked for a War Poem

I think it better that in times like these

A poet's mouth be silent, for in truth

We have no gift to set a statesman right;

He has had enough of meddling who can please

A young girl in the indolence of her youth,

Or an old man upon a winter’s night.
           --William Butler Yeats

While Yeats' poem doesn't sound as outraged as Starr's lyrics, there's an edge and an attitude here as well, and at least two very different ways of making sense of the poem.   The poem can be read in the context of WB Yeats' letters and other writings, an example of wonderfully snarky literary gossip at its best – or worst – that asks the question, "What is good poetry?" 

or….

The poem can be read on its own terms, as it asks the question, "What is poetry good for?" 

First the literary gossip.  Eighteen years after the war had ended, Yeats edited an anthology of poetry that included his choices of the best poems from the end of the 19^th century through 1935.  And he pointedly omitted the British poets of the First World War.  Nothing from Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, or the others – nothing.  Yeats defended his decision in the anthology's introduction, writing, "I have a distaste for certain poems written in the midst of the great war; they are in all anthologies….The writers of these poems were invariably officers of exceptional courage and capacity…-- but felt bound, in the words of the best known, to plead the suffering of their men. In poems that had for a time considerable fame, written in the first person, they made that suffering their own. I have rejected these poems....passive suffering is not a theme for poetry. In all the great tragedies, tragedy is a joy to the man who dies." 

Many authors believe that Yeats' comments were a thinly veiled allusion to Wilfred Owen's comments about war poetry.  Before his death in 1918, Owen had written a draft preface to his poetry: "This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds, or land, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War. Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful."

Where Yeats' decision becomes much more interesting – and gossipy – is in a letter he wrote to a friend.  Not intended for publication, Yeats's comments not only dismiss Owen and the war poets, but are fascinatingly personal with a bit of spite:  "My anthology continues to sell…& the critics get more & more angry. When I excluded Wilfred Owen, whom I consider unworthy of the poets' corner of a country newspaper, I did not know I was excluding a revered sandwich-board Man of the revolution & that some body has put his worst & most famous poem in a glass-case in the British Museum-- however if I had known it I would have excluded him just the same. He is all blood, dirt & sucked sugar stick…. There is every excuse for him but none for those who like him. . . ."  Ouch.  

It's fascinating to discover the ways in which poems and poets of the First World War have been alternatively dismissed and venerated over the years.  But Yeats' "On being asked for a war poem" is much more than a historical debate about taste – it deserves to be read and understood on its own merits.  

WB Yeats

Yeats wrote the poem in 1915 and sent it in a letter to Henry James, who had asked him specifically to write a poem that addressed the war and its politics.   Yeats first titled the poem "To a friend who has asked me to sign his manifesto to the neutral nations" – quite long-winded for a six-line poem!  When he sent it back to James, he shortened the title to "A Reason for Keeping Silent."  The title was changed a third time, appearing in its current version when Yeats included it a book of his poems published a year after the war ended.  I think the current title is the strongest because it names an action (being asked) and directly references war. 

The poem seems to imply that a writer can be a soldier or a pacifist or a protester, but that his actions should speak louder than his versified words: his mouth should "be silent" when it comes to politics. It is not the job of poetry to "set a statesman right."* My guess is that Yeats would scorn the tradition of poet laureates who are charged to write timely poems relevant to national concerns.  Unlike other voices who have claimed that poets serve as the conscience of a culture – Percy Shelley, for example, argued that poets were the "unacknowledged legislators of the world" -- this poem claims a very different role for poetry.   

Poetry meddles in the personal, in the dreams of a young girl and in the backward looking reflections of an old man.  Poems invade the thoughts and lives of individuals, not "girls" and "men," but "a young girl" and "an old man."  Putting aside for a minute the fact that only one year later, Yeats wrote a much longer poem about the Irish political uprising of Easter 1916, "On being asked for a war poem" asks the reader provocatively, almost teasingly, to consider why he or she bothers to read poetry.  It's a short, personal poem that is willing to undercut itself as it intimately asks each of us what we think, what we feel, about poems, the war, and our personal experiences.   

Jane Hirshfield in Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World, argues, "Entering a good poem, a person feels, tastes, hears, thinks, and sees in altered ways."  That is, poetry changes us, showing us new ways of living and understanding.  About that, perhaps both Owen and Yeats could have agreed. 

*"Conversing with the World: the Poet in Society" offers a fascinating discussion of American politics and poetry.  

**"In Praise of Memorizing Poetry – Badly" shares an entertaining story about the word "meddling" in the poem, considering what the choice adds to the poem as a whole.