Analytical Essay Example for Poetry Out Loud

***For those of you who want a model, here is the essay I wrote in response to the poem I memorized for Poetry Out Loud. 

Jeff Baird
Analysis
Announcement Lead
Strong, Punched Statement Conclusion

In Balance With This Life, This Death

William Butler Yeats’s poem, “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” is about a fighter pilot going off to war.  He knows - in fact, seems to hope - that he will die up in the clouds, never to return. The poem begins with the assertion, “I know that I shall meet my fate/ somewhere among the clouds above”. The airman is neither happy nor sad about this, neither fearful nor excited. He has simply accepted his fate, for no one can escape fate.
The speaker goes on to state, “Those that I fight I do not hate;/ those I  thatgu ard I do not love;/ my country is Kiltartan Cross,/ my countrymen Kiltartan’s poor;/ no likely end could bring them loss,/ nor leave them happier than before.” If this is true, if he neither hates his enemy nor loves his countrymen, if his fighting and sacrifice make no difference, why go to war at all? Because it is fate. And because he cannot escape fate, he must seek it out, and this internal impulse is his motivation. He is not responding to external pressures nor going foto r for reasons we typically assume men do: “No law nor duty bade me fight/ nor public men nor cheering crowds”. This man is stirred neither by patriotism nor fame, only “A lonely impulse of delight/ drove to this tumult in the clouds”.
This term “delight” is unsettling, for there is no happiness here, only acceptance. The poem’s overall tone is one of somberness - not sadness, exactly, but a melancholy resignation. The speaker may desire the peace he thinks death will bring, but he doesn’t seek it out with the gusto typical of those embarking on a quest. The speaker says he “balanced all, brought all to mind” and in this balancing comes to realize “The years to come seemed waste of breath/ a waste of breath the years behind”. It is in this revelation we come to learn why there is no sadness or fear as he prepares for war: if everything to come after this present moment, and everything leading up to this present moment, is a waste of breath, then this moment is also waste of breath, unremarkable, as drab as the previous present moment, a glum equality of waste.
It is this equality, or perhaps the better term is balance, that is the heart of the poem. The speaker’s last line is “In balance with this life, this death.” It is this line that clarifies the poem, for everything in the poem speaks of balance. Structurally, the poem is sixteen lines long, divided equally between two eight-line sentences. Each line is four iambic feet - eight syllables - echoing both the military beating of the drums as well as reinforcing the structural balance. There is duality and opposites throughout the poem, ranging from the how the outcome of the war will neither hurt nor hinder Kiltartan’s poor, to the fighter’s lack of emotion toward both those he fights and defends.

This then brings us to a final realization, and a final question, that being whether it is possible for two nothings to equal out. For if a death is to matter at all, even in terms of simply balancing out the life that preceded it, isn’t it necessary for the life itself to have meant something?