I was plesed to find an analysis in The Free Press today of one of my favorite poems by Yeats, “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death,” and here’s one of Yeats’s masterpieces:
I know that I shall meet my fateSomewhere 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 lossOr leave them happier than before.Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,A lonely impulse of delightDrove 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 behindIn balance with this life, this death.
Click the screenshot below to read Klay’s take on the poem:
A few words by Phil Klay about the poem. First he analyzes the structure and internal rhymes of the poem, and I have to say that at this form of composition Yeats excelled. He stuck to rhymes (and nearly all good poems do), but not conventional form. Klay:
It’s a perfect little poem, and incredibly easy to memorize, with a singsongy abab rhyme scheme and lines in iambic tetrameter which, as is often the case with Yeats, somehow end up feeling like natural speech despite the rigorous perfection of the form.
Yeats also regularly makes parallelisms, such that one line will answer or complete another. At the time, I thought it was a great poem for a young man heading off to war. One of the other lieutenants, Irish by birth and heading to be a pilot, thought so too, and he borrowed my copy so he could memorize it as well. Here is the text:
And this description is a form of “truth”: it’s simply how the poem is set out: the situation, the choice of words, and the rhymes. That can all be described objectively, just like the structure of a sonata can be divided into three parts and is in a certain key. In that sense, and in that sense alone, one can find “truth” in this work. But that’s not the kind of truth that English professors say that they’re teaching their students. After all, isn’t the purpose of a university to find and promulgate “truth and knowledge”?
And one can guess, though this is not so easy, what the pilot is really trying to say. Here’s Klay’s take:
Accustomed as we are to the anti-war poets of World War I, it can be jarring to read such a dark but stunningly beautiful poem. The narrator isn’t bloodthirsty or sociopathic, but there is something in warfare he can’t shake: something valuable, something teased at with the maddeningly vague line about the “lonely impulse of delight” driving men to war—an impulse distinct from patriotism.
What is this lonely impulse, if not “law” or “duty”?
The fact is, some people like the work of war. Every year, tens of thousands of young people join the Army or Marine Corps. They want the camaraderie of war, the adventure, the intellectual challenge but also the sheer beauty of it—of night fires and powerful weaponry and superbly trained groups of men and women operating with skill and precision. Beyond that, though, is the encounter with the utter limits of human experience, something the World War I veteran Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, in a 1917 essay on his strange longing to return to the front, described as a “unique atmosphere, penetrating and dense, in which this entire richness of violence and majesty bathes.”
And then there’s the poem’s equanimity about death. As a young man in military training, that attitude seemed admirable to me. It’s also one often expressed by soldiers and Marines.
But wait! As he got older, Klay changed his mind about the emotions expressed in the poem:
Now, slightly older and looking back, I see the sentiments of the poem differently. It’s not mere bluster—or not entirely. Rather, it’s the speaker, amid the vast, impersonal, and terrifying forces of the battlefield, privately finding a way to confront the unimaginable possibility of his own death.
Well, what is it? What does the poem mean? What is its “truth”? Is it Klay’s first take that it’s the pilot exposing himself to a unique and stimulating experience, or is it instead about the poet rationalizing his actions and likely death by realizing that it’s all meaningless? Or is it both? Or something else?
This is the beauty of poetry: it is music in words, sometimes expresses a point of view that can be ambiguous, , but gives only one point of view, and one that is not universal. There is no “propositional truth” here that can be deemed “true” or “false”. It’s simply the expression of an emotion and, to put it somewhat crassly, a form of entertainment.
This is all, of course, part of my view that the fine arts, an essential part of a good liberal education, differs from other areas of education in that it doesn’t deal with finding truth. I am not of course denigrating the humanities, as I count them among the most valuable part of my own education. (And yes, some of what counts as “humanities,” like economics and sociology, can be a search for propositional truth.) It’s just that the finding of truth is not the point of any of the arts: not of cinema, painting, dance, music, poetry, or long-form literature. I won’t explicate further on this as I’m writing something longer, except to add that this shows that the old saw that the purpose of a university is to find and disseminate truth is not 100% correct.
Finally, let me put up another poem by Yeats that I love. You may well have read this one, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree“:
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,And live alone in the bee-loud glade.And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,And evening full of the linnet’s wings.I will arise and go now, for always night and dayI hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
It is a gorgeous work, with A/B/A/B stanzas, but with lovely alliteration and a last line that’s a bit jarring as it deviates in meter from the other stanzas’ last lines and has no word longer than one syllable.
What is its “truth”? Well, the writer clearly is tired of urban life and wants to decamp to nature, living a Thoreau-ian life with linnet’s wings. Did Yeats feel that way, or, as in the first poem, is he only putting emotions into another speaker’s head? I suspect it’s Yeat’s own feelings. How would we know, though? The poet is dead, and we can’t ask him. Perhaps he described the meaning of the poem somewhere else, and in that case we would have a “truth”: Yeats was sick of the city and wanted to live alone in nature. Maybe this was a familiar feeling he had and expressed to others, which could help verify that he was speaking for himself. But if that’s the poem’s “truth,” it is a trivial truth. In this sense the “truth” can teach us nothing that isn’t trivial and nothing that is universal. (I prefer to live an urban life.)
But of course that’s not why we revere poems like this. It’s like saying that the “truth” in Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” is this: “Someone’s overweening ambition can drive them to tragedy.” Some truth! We already know that sometimes that happens, and sometimes it doesn’t. The value of such art is its ability to stimulate our own emotions, to allow us to reflect on our own selves by seeing other people’s different points of view, and to expose us beauty that we would otherwise lack.
Well, these are some random musings, but if you find any “truth” in this poem that couldn’t have been seen otherwise, or hadn’t already been said otherwise, and without the poetry, by all means let me know what it is. Remember, Klay himself can’t pin down any truth in the first poem, for he changed his mind about it over the years.
I wonder if poetry might make a bit of a comeback since the required attention span to read poems like these is suitable for the TikTok crowd.
Yes, but then there’s “Paradise Lost”. . . . .
Milton’s magnificent poem. Read the version with prologue and chapter introductions by Philip Pullman, a noted atheist and lover of Milton. His cycle “His dark materials” gets its title from a line in Paradise Lost. It’s Satan’s revolt after his being past over for head of Yahweh’s armies due to an extraordinary act of nepotism.
Excellent pick. It seems Armistice Day is getting out early this year? Ricky Gervais posted a photo poppy.
I punt and suggest the truth here lies in the eye of the beholder – make of it what you will. I think that, perhaps, is everything. Reflect, think, listen, express, live, change, repeat…
Here’s another poem I saw today – and the credit was nowhere to be found of course – a verification is in order esp. punctuation – the origin for the movie title They Shall Not Grow Old:
They shall grow not old
as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them,
nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun
and in the morning
We will remember them.
from “For the Fallen”, by Laurence Binyon
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57322/for-the-fallen
The stanza (one of seven) is recited at Remembrance Day ceremonies in Canada every Nov. 11.
🎯
Appreciated
I memorised it and recited it in front of the school assembly at an Anzac Day service held at my high school in Australia, back in the late 1960s or early 1970s. I did not know that it was by Laurence Binyon, whose work I have had something to do with while living in Japan. Two disparate threads of my life have entwined in a way that I never would have expected. And the Yeats poem struck me strongly, again, but in a different way than it has before. Why these tears?
I find a prophetic¹ sort of truth in another piece of verse included in Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old:
1918 to 1939 was 21 years.
. . . . .
¹ In both literal and metaphorical senses.
A. E. Houseman’s “Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries”:
In 1914 the Germans derided the British Expeditionary Force in France, which was made up of professional, volunteer soldiers, because, unlike conscripts, they served for pay. I’ve never seen the sense in that criticism.
Derided, I believe, because it was so small by comparison with continental, mass conscription armies.
The BEF in 1914 was about 90,000 men. To give context, the French army lost nearly that many men killed in the Battle of the Frontiers which lasted maybe a week or two in August and September 1914.
For the first poem, I admit to being rather baffled by it until its context was explained.
But there are two interpretations given by the FP author, and I’m sure I could come up with others.
Well, not so called ‘ scientific objective truth’ – but the truths of our feelings which can be examined, cultivated, enriched, refined, etc. thru poetry, other arts, just living – not indulgence but genuine understanding, cultivating insight – hopefully leading towards wisdom!! Says me.
Comment by Greg Mayer
Yeats, though Protestant Anglo-Irish, was an Irish nationalist, and thus the Irish airman is flying not for his country, but for the English. He does not love the English he guards, nor does he hate the Germans he fights. His country and countrymen are in Ireland, and what he is doing will not effect them one way or the other. (Kiltartan is in County Galway.) He is not obligated to fight for the English, yet he does, driven by “A lonely impulse of delight.”
The airman’s motivation reminded me of the book My War Gone By, I Miss It So by the war correspondent Anthony Loyd, who found war deeply attractive. (I have not read the book, but read reviews and media coverage when it was first published.)
(I don’t subscribe to the Free Press, so can only see Jerry’s snippets of Klay’s analysis– Klay may mention some of these things.)
GCM
Insightful,.. and concise – thanks
Note that the Irish recruits were volunteers. I’m not saying that this was not how Yeats was thinking, however.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ireland_and_World_War_I
“…the Irish airman is flying not for his country, but for the English.”
Not quite. The poem dates from 1919, and is presumably “set” during the war that ended the previous year — times when Ireland was an integral part of the United Kingdom. So the “country” he is “not” fighting for is Ireland as well. The contrast he is making is with nations and the local community a warrior springs from, rather than a particular nation.
The Irish political context, of which Yeats was particularly aware, is complicated on this point. The UK parliment had voted for home rule for Ireland in 1912 but the implementation this was delayed for several years by the House of Lords. By this point WW1 had begun and the UK government decided to delay Irish home rule until the end of the war. The led to huge numbers of deaths of Irish volunteer soldiers at the Somme and Ypres. In 1918 the UK government voted to impose conscription in Ireland, a hugely unpopular measure who felt betrayed that the Home Rule bill was not being implemented and traumatized by the deaths of so many volunteers. It was in this background that the Irish political republican movement built up support, sweeping the election 1919 and leading to the war of Independence when their demands for home rule were again ignored.
Yeats wrote the poem at this time, but also in a time when soldiering was seen as an almost romantic notion, not directly connected to nationalism but more a sign of strong manhood. Joining the British army would be seen by many not as a support of the Empire but more akin to joining the foreign legion, a way to do soldiering.
Finally, I would wonder about the airman aspect of this. This was very close to the invention of powered airplanes and being able to fly was something open to a tiny number of people but a subject of amazement by nearly everyone at that time.
There is something about this poem that reminds me of Richard Russell, the non-pilot baggage handler who stole a plane in some Washington state airport in 2018, probably exactly 100 years since Yeats wrote his poem, and proceeded to fly loops in it until he apologized to the responders and committed suicide by crashing into the sea.
The Royal Flying Corps grew rapidly through the war as all the combatant nations learned how to use air power. By the time it amalgamated with the under-used Royal Naval Air Service in 1918 to form the Royal Air Force, it had a strength of 114,000 men and operated 4,000 combat aircraft net of losses in 150 squadrons. Considering the end of the war was only 15 years after the first controlled powered flight and most RFC personnel had never even seen an airplane before joining up, as you note, this and similar expansion on the German side is an almost unbelievable achievement.
I wonder if Yeats’s poem was perhaps inspired by two young friends, one Irish and one British-Irish, both decorated air aces with the RFC despite both being Irish nationalists who were killed in action within days of one another in the last months of the war, Capt. George McIlroy and Maj. Edward Mannock VC
Comment by Greg Mayer
The poem is widely believed to be about Robert Gregory, an Anglo-Irish World War I ace who died on the Italian front. He was the son of Lady Augusta Gregory, a friend of Yeats and fellow writer. During the war, the abortive Easter Rebellion occurred; Irish nationalists did not think of themselves as loyal subjects of the United Kingdom.
The poem, of course, expresses Yeats’ view, or perhaps Yeats’ view of Gregory’s view, not Gregory’s. Yeats, as did many Anglo-Irish, had a complex view of the relation between Ireland and Great Britain. There was no conscription in Ireland, yet many Irish, like Gregory, volunteered. It is the motives for this that Yeats speculates on.
GCM
Missed your comment when I left mine above.
Much acknowledged. ✅
I’m an Australian veteran and the words of Yeats ring true for me also. A naive enlistment at the age of 17 and I could have discharged nine years later. I served for thirty instead. But it wasn’t my oath to the Queen or any form of patriotism that kept me going despite the physical and mental toll. Yeats makes lots of sense.
After the roaring specters of war that numb your mind to the extent your life no longer matters to the needs to silence those same demons to living a life described in The Lake Isle of Innisfree is a common theme expressed across the Australian veteran community. I thank Yeats for putting into words what I cannot
It goes well with watching House of Dynamite on Netflix.
Murmurs, buried thoughts, brought out with this posting along with the comments, especially Grants. Thank you!
Harlan Ellison may have put this controversy over truth in the arts to bed when in answer to a question at the 16:08 minute mark of an interview on YouTube DARK DREAMERS – Season 1, Episode 8: Harlan Ellison he says:
People who claim there is truth in the arts use the wrong word. Their truths are verisimilitudes. And since truth is often uttered with a capital “T,” is seems to me the real question is “Do the arts provide knowledge?”
Knowledge is usually defined as “justified true belief.”
“the bee-loud glade”
Sublime poetry!
I am going to post my own thoughts before I read other’s comments on this beautiful poem. And no, I do not believe art has a single Truth.
The whole world was at war with a scale of death previously unknown. I think the man was motivated by the horror of the times: it was the moment of time he was in that he believed he had to meet in this way. The speaker has rejected duty, honor or glory; nor was he drafted against his will. After rejecting all traditional reasons for fighting, he claims to do so on impulse. The war felt profound to him beyond any apparent rational, nameable reason like patriotism. This was the choice he felt compelled to make: any other choice would waste his life.
When I was in grade school, we all learned to sing “Ballad of the Green Beret”. The lyrics were straight forward, there was no fear of death, and motivations for the soldier’s reasons for his sacrifice were patriotic and unquestionable. In this poem, his reasons for making this sacrifice are ambiguous. “A lonely impulse of delight” is a motivation personal and incomprehensible, but inescapable for him. This poem makes me feel a sorrowful sense of the meaningless of war and this man’s fate, and yet of having great respect for this his choice.
Meant as a reply to Frau Katze but it won’t link for some reason.
All pilots were volunteers — officers.
The Royal Flying Corps, then part of the British Army, recruited them from the cavalry under the reasoning that if you were good handling a horse you could probably learn to fly also with the seat of your pants, which might have been sound. Even better if you’d grown up with horses, an aristocrat. Being a natural crack shot with a good eye for deflection became more important once airplanes were expected to hit each other instead of just observing the fall of artillery shot and shooting at the enemy’s observation balloons. The pilots who survived combat were almost unnaturally gifted at shooting. Many highly skilled fliers died because they got out-shot, not out-flown. And they had to be lucky enough not to die from their airplanes breaking up when they tried to land them.
Pilots of that pioneering, glamorous, still chivalrous era describe the sheer joy of flying alone and supreme in the Heavens, so different from the mud, boredom, and mayhem of trench warfare. Many of the aerobatic manoeuvres used to this day by combat pilots and airshow performers were invented by those seat-of-the-pants pilots “pushing the envelope”, learning for themselves, because no one else knew, just what their aircraft could do without the wings breaking off or going into an unrecoverable spin. One of the Canadian aces, Bill Barker I think, withdrew his first request for transfer to the RFC when he saw a pilot jump out of a burning airplane high above No-Man’s Land. Parachutes had been invented and used by balloonists but they were considered unmanly for this new order of knights. They all knew they were on this earth for a good time, not a long time. And that in dying they would not have to live in The After.
You can take Yeats’s poem, even without knowing that he was an Irish republican sympathizer, as expressing the love of flying and hunting for their own sake…with extra nuance to make it ambiguous enough to be a memorable poem. I really like it.
If I juxtapose it with “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” I am hearing in the latter, especially in the last line, the voice of a shell-shocked and legless veteran of trench combat condemned to live out his days in an urban slum begging and foraging for whom the Lake Isle will be nothing but a bitter fantasy eating at his heart. That can’t be literally true because Lake Isle was written in 1889 but still….
(1) I read the “lonely impulse of delight” wlas the pleasure of flying.
(2) Joni Mitchell set “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” to a lovely melody.
Ah ha!
I thought that rang a bell 🎶!
The last stanza of Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn contains these words: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”. I often find that great poets have insights that scientists later re-discover and explain. As in this case, it seems to me that Keats is saying that beauty is often a proxy for quality, and quality is often perceived as beautiful.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44477/ode-on-a-grecian-urn
That is not a propositional truth but an opinion, and cannot be verified by science. What, exactly, is science explaining here? Beauty is a proxy for quality, and vice versa. That is not always true and science has nothing to say about it.
You are right, it is an opinion. But then, ultimately, everything is an opinion, with some opinions have stronger (even iron clad – as, for example, Darwin-Wallace theory of evolution through natural selection) lines of evidence than the other. Even in math, what is considered axioms are only (strong) opinions — for example, the Fifth Postulate of Euclid’s geometry, was later substituted by different postulates by Lobachevsky/Bolyai and Riemann in two non-Euclidean geometries. In the Keats’ case, an explanation of the connection between quality and beauty was later suggested by the hypothesis of Handicap Principle by Zahavi/Spence/Schelling: for a message to be credible, it has to be difficult to fake.
Keats was not referring to mate choice, but a Grecian urn for crying out loud. So please do not pretend that science has somehow vindicated Keats. And that is the end of this exchange, as I don’t want this mielading idea to be promulgated further here and dominate the thread.
Yeats wrote “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” when he was only 23. Here is a link to a recording of him explaining and reading it. He reads it in a way emphasizing its rhythm, demanding it NOT be read as if it were prose. I also was amused to hear that the inspiration for it was the tinkling sound of an advertising display in a drug store, a small ball balanced on a jet of water!
https://youtu.be/LDNJCEZYyvI?si=DXCXbKOQ5Lfuisf4
Yeats’s poem reminded me of the Bhagavad Gita, a philosophical dialogue in which the Prince Arjuna questions the point of the battle he faces against his own relatives. The Lord Krishna reminds him of duty (dharma) and selfless action, and higher meaning that transcends our mortal existence..