His poems on the Easter Rebellion point in a thousand directions. And "An Irish Airman Forsees His Death" can/should be glossed by the shot near the end of the movie All Quiet on the Western Front where the sergeant is carrying a wounded man onhis back, a a lonely plane appears high on the screen, there is chatter of machine gun fire, & the sergeant trudges on not knowing he is now carrying a corpse. _That_ is your Irish Airman in his lonely moment of ecstacy.
Carrol
123hop at comcast.net wrote:
>
> He did write this:
>
> September 1916
>
> What need you, being come to sense,
> But fumble in a greasy till
> And add the halfpence to the pence
> And prayer to shivering prayer, until
> You have dried the marrow from the bone; 5
> For men were born to pray and save:
> Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
> It’s with O’Leary in the grave.
>
> Yet they were of a different kind
> The names that stilled your childish play, 10
> They have gone about the world like wind,
> But little time had they to pray
> For whom the hangman’s rope was spun,
> And what, God help us, could they save:
> Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, 15
> It’s with O’Leary in the grave.
>
> Was it for this the wild geese spread
> The grey wing upon every tide;
> For this that all that blood was shed,
> For this Edward Fitzgerald died, 20
> And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,
> All that delirium of the brave;
> Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
> It’s with O’Leary in the grave.
>
> Yet could we turn the years again, 25
> And call those exiles as they were,
> In all their loneliness and pain
> You’d cry ‘Some woman’s yellow hair
> Has maddened every mother’s son’:
> They weighed so lightly what they gave, 30
> But let them be, they’re dead and gone,
> They’re with O’Leary in the grave.
>
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