This poem was written in response to the death of Robert Gregory, though Yeats does not make this explicit within the poem itself. Gregory, a young man killed in the First World War, was the son of Lady Augusta Gregory. Lady Gregory, meanwhile, was herself a close friend of W.B. Yeats. The poem does not name either Lady Gregory or Robert Gregory, but readers familiar with this history can discern hints of it in the poem: for instance, in Yeats's reference to the region of Kiltartan. Here, we will discuss the lives and deaths of Augusta and Robert Gregory, as well as both the mother and the son's relationship to Yeats.
Lady Gregory was born aristocratic and married William Gregory, the owner of Coole Park, an estate in Kiltartan. Her husband died in the 1890s, leaving her a widow throughout her artistic and literary career. The ruling class from which Gregory came tended to support the continuation of British rule in Ireland, and more generally to benefit from Ireland's status as a colony. However, in her adult life, Gregory turned against these pro-colonial attitudes and began to support Irish independence. As she developed a strong identification with Irishness as a whole, Lady Gregory began to perform folkloric and linguistic research in her own backyard. She sought insights into Irish culture from the workers and farmers in Kiltartan, attempting to overcome the divisions between herself—an aristocratic landlord living in Kiltartan's grand estate—and the poorer residents of the area.
Lady Gregory was herself a writer and an active member of the Irish cultural revival that occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Her folkloric research was part of an artistic and political project to celebrate Irish folklore, language, and culture. Yeats too was a major player in the Irish cultural revival, as well as a close collaborator with Lady Gregory. The two writers met in 1896. Three years later, they collaborated to establish the Irish Literary Theatre, an institution with the goal of creating and advancing an Irish theatrical canon. She also served as the director of the Abbey Theatre, another incubator for the dramatic arts in Ireland. Like Yeats, Gregory worked as a playwright, and the two collaborated on several plays. She also translated works from Irish Gaelic, transforming works such as the poem "Donal Og," or "Young Donal," into the local dialect of Hiberno-English spoken in her home region of Kiltartan. Throughout their friendship, moreover, Lady Gregory served as a patron for Yeats, offering him housing at Coole Park while he wrote.
Robert Gregory was born in 1881. Prior to his death in World War I, Robert Gregory was an accomplished cricket player as well as an artist. He was a frequent collaborator with his mother and with Yeats, designing sets and costumes for numerous plays produced at the Abbey Theatre. He was also the father of three children. Yeats and Robert Gregory had an intimate but often strained relationship, with Yeats entering into longstanding familial conflicts by virtue of his constant presence at Coole. Yeats, for instance, considered Robert somewhat irresponsible or directionless. However, when Robert was shot down during his air force service (likely by friendly fire), Lady Gregory contacted Yeats with the news, commenting "If you feel like it some time, write something down that we may keep. You understood him better than many."
"An Irish Airman Foresees His Death" is one of several attempts to eulogize Robert Gregory, alongside "Shepherd and Goatherd’" and "In Memory of Major Robert Gregory." It is, moreover, the only one of the three poems to speak from Robert's perspective. At the same time, it does not strictly record the reality of Robert Gregory's feelings and stances. Robert Gregory, unlike Yeats or Augusta Gregory, was generally in favor of British imperial rule. Moreover, unlike the speaker of the poem, Robert Gregory appears to have been motivated by feelings of duty and patriotism—emotions that the poem's speaker explicitly rejects. This work, in other words, has a complex relationship to biographical reality. Though the poem's genesis can be linked very clearly to a specific external event, Yeats makes the decision to blend the fictional and the nonfictional together.
