An Irish American Forsees His Death Literary Elements

The speaker is identified in the title: he is an airman from Ireland. The narration is framed as an interior monologue spoken in the first person.

A dramatic monologue in single stanza form comprised of sixteen lines. The meter is iambic tetrameter.

The poem opens with a metaphor for death. Instead of simply saying that he knows he will died, the speaker couches it in the imagery of “meet my fate.”

The speaker uses alliteration to describe the specifics of where in Ireland he hails from: “My country is Kiltartan Cross.”
Many of the poem’s rhymes are actually examples of assonance: “above/love,” “poor/before,” and “fight/delight” being just a few examples.

The central irony is not directly addressed, but infuses throughout: he is an Irish Catholic fighting in the service of the English protestant government which is oppressing his homeland.

World War One poetry/Anti-war poetry

The poem takes place at some point and location during World War I that is never specified.

The tone of this poem is so difficult to pinpoint that a very brief and incomplete listing of attributions made by others is perhaps most effective for demonstration: pessimistic, anti-heroic, resigned, nihilistic, disenchanted, bleak, fatalistic, realistic, and ironic. The conclusion one reaches is probably highly dependent upon one’s own emotional reaction.

The speaker is the protagonist, but war is, perhaps surprisingly, not the antagonist. The antagonist is patriotic propaganda in all its myriad forms.

A difficult thing to concretely identify, but a strong case can be made that real conflict at play in the poem is between self-determination of one’s own fate and external powers seeking to control that fate.

Really more of an anti-climax. After expending much energy informing the reader in unambiguous terms what didn’t drive him to go to war, the poem reaches a climax by finally providing the reason he did decide to go to war. This decision proves to be so steeped in ambiguity, however, as to provide no definitive answer whatever.

The title is an example of ironic foreshadowing. It carries the promise that the speaker will die. That turns out to be an unfulfilled promise.

The answer to the question of what drove the speaker to join the battle in a war on behalf of a country oppressing his homeland more than the actual enemy he is fighting arrives as understatement due to its abstract ambiguity: “A lonely impulse of delight.”

The entire poem exists as merely an allusion to World War I since that conflict is never actually mentioned or referenced by familiar terms.

These are the predominant literary techniques of the poem as the speaker constantly makes instantly recognizable references which describe something in symbolic terms rather than direct implication:
“Kiltartan Cross” represents an entire region of Ireland.
“Public men” represents political interests in propagandizing war.
National pride is presented in the form of “cheering crowds.”

Existence—or the pointlessness of it—is personified through the use of use of the phrase “waste of breath” twice.

One can certainly make the case the speaker’s complex tone of pessimism reaches its hyperbolic peak with his assertion on behalf of the entire population of Ireland that “No likely end could bring them loss / Or leave them happier than before.”

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