For the second day of a week of war poetry in The New York Sun, guest editor Phil Klay writes:

I memorized “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” during Marine Corps training, shivering in the Quantico woods . . . and I passed it on to a fellow officer, born in Ireland, who after the Basic School was heading on to become an airman himself. This poem is, first and foremost, beautiful — easy to memorize and a pleasure to recite, as with so much of the work of William Butler Yeats (1865–1939).

The poem is a kindred spirit to another poem I memorized in those woods, Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” though with a darker, or at least more muted, register. Tennyson clearly admires the old soldier who, having “drunk delight of battle” feels unsatisfied with a life a peace, leaving to his son the (lesser, the poem cannot help but imply) labor of “by slow prudence to make mild / A rugged people, and thro’ soft degrees / Subdue them to the useful and the good.”

Yeats approaches that same drive with less gusto. We don’t really know how to feel about this airman who fights not because of political conviction or patriotism or duty or moral impulse, but who simply says: “A lonely impulse of delight / Drove to this tumult in the clouds.”

Yeats’s speaker is not heroic; he just seems honest about a drive for exploration, for intense experience unmoored from purpose or morals. “Why did we go to war?” asked Vietnam veteran Gustav Hasford. “They’ve been trying to figure that out since Hitler was a corporal. We were young, and the young love to travel.”

An Irish Airman Foresees His Death
by William Butler Yeats

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 men, 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.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.