“An Irish Airman Foresees his Death.”

W. B. Yeats

“An Irish Airman Foresees his Death.”

1918

Autograph manuscript drafts

On February 2, 1918, Gregory wrote to Yeats, “The long dreaded telegram has come—Robert has been killed in action.” Her note concludes by asking Yeats to “write something down that we may keep.” The four elegies he subsequently composed had to be written, if not to order, at least so as to satisfy both Gregory and Robert’s widow. Yeats’s first, “Shepherd and Goatherd,” was clearly inadequate. “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory” celebrates Robert as a latter-day Renaissance man and leads to a cathartic closure. Gregory termed it Robert’s “monument.” Finally, Yeats wrote, “An Irish Airman Foresees his Death,” told from the pilot’s dispassionate viewpoint. “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..”

Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations