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"An Irish Airman Foresees His Death" is a poem by Irish poet William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), written in 1918 and first published in the Macmillan edition of The Wild Swans at Coole in 1919. [1] The poem is a soliloquy given by an aviator in the First World War in which the narrator describes the circumstances surrounding his imminent death.
The poem is also connected to the 1918–1919 flu pandemic. In the weeks preceding Yeats′s writing of the poem, his pregnant wife, Georgie Hyde-Lees, caught the virus and was very close to death, but she survived. The highest death rates of the pandemic were among pregnant women, who in some areas had a death rate of up to 70%.
Yeats began by writing epic poems such as The Isle of Statues and The Wanderings of Oisin. [109] His other early poems are lyrics on the themes of love or mystical and esoteric subjects. Yeats's middle period saw him abandon the pre-Raphaelite character of his early work [ 110 ] and attempt to turn himself into a Landor -style social ironist.
"Under Ben Bulben" was first published in July 1939, six months after Yeats' death, as the first poem in the collection Last Poems and Two Plays in a limited edition released by his sister. The trade edition Last Poems & Plays, published in 1940, added the content of New Poems and three poems printed in On the Boiler. It also made "Under Ben ...
1919 – The Wild Swans at Coole, significant revision of the 1917 edition: has the poems from the 1917 edition and others, including "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death" and "The Phases of the Moon"; contains: "The Wild Swans at Coole", "Ego Dominus Tuus", "The Scholars" and "On being asked for a War Poem" [2]
Byzantium" is a sequel to "Sailing to Byzantium" (from The Tower), meant to better explain the ideas of the earlier poem. An important insight on Yeats's concern of death lay in the poem "Byzantium" which further exploits the contrast of the physical and spiritual form and the final stanza concludes by differentiating the two.
The young Yeats had been encouraged by them and entranced by their beauty. They are remembered in the poem as "Two girls in silk kimonos, both / beautiful, one a gazelle." Both later became involved in Irish nationalist politics, and Constance was sentenced to death for her part in the Easter Rising of 1916, though the sentence was subsequently ...
The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics is the second poetry collection of W. B. Yeats. [1] [2]It includes the play The Countess Cathleen and group of shorter lyrics that Yeats would later collect under the title of The Rose in his Collected Poems.