the poetry of pain Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Norpublic 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.One striking feature of Yeats’s poem is the stress on the idea of balance, a formal
as well as a thematic emphasis: notice, for instance, how the rhyming words
function essentially as a series of counterbalancing or oppositional properties,
here fight/delight, crowd/clouds, mind/behind, and especially breath/death. The
repeated term ‘balance’, that is, works in consort with the poem’s structure to
embed a deep sense of harmony into the poem’s depiction of the death-drive that
is war. If politics plays no part in the occasion of war for the airman (‘Those that I
fight I do not hate|Those that I guard I do not love’), war itself does fundamentally
create the situation of the poem—the metaphysical situation, the nature of its
‘delight’, the ‘tumult’ of its ‘clouds’. One ought not, that is, to mistake the poem’s
distancing of the war’s loyalties for a distancing of war: it is only in war that this kind
of paradoxical lightness can be imagined (here defined by the new technology of
flight, whose extreme dangers are not eclipsed by its romance). And a last instance
of a paradoxical tranquillity animating the contemplation of death in war comes
in Keith Douglas’s ‘How to Kill’, a poem rife with irony about the power of one
person to cause the death of another. In its final stanza, ‘How to Kill’ considers
what we might, following Kundera, term the unbearable lightness of being:
The weightless mosquito touches
her tiny shadow on the stone,
and with how like, how infinite
a lightness, man and shadow meet.
They fuse. A shadow is a man
when the mosquito death approaches.^32If moments of quiet reflection in war—or, better, the quiet reflection that is
specific to war—have an important place in war verse, so too does grief, again
a grief that is construed as specific to war. As we have seen, the most telling
instance in Homer of a form of mourning particular to war involves the meeting of
Achilles and Priam, where mourning represents a cultural achievement as much as
Augusta Gregory, and his death was a source of grief within their community. For all its personal
specificity, the poem makes its own contribution to the raging debate about Ireland’s position in the
war, its metaphysics in a sensestanding in for the tense political divisions that accompanied the Irish
participation in the war effort.
(^32) Keith Douglas, ‘How to Kill’, inTheCompletePoems, ed. Desmond Graham (London: Faber,
2000), 119.