In many ways, Lord Byron’s “Written After Swimming from Sestos to Abydos” and William Butler Yeats’ “An Irish Airman Foresees His Own Death” are quite similar. Thematically, both poems involve an exploration of the individual’s awareness of and acceptance of death, specifically death as a possible consequence of serving some greater good beyond one’s own self-interests. Both of the poems are also similar in that they are situated within a natural setting in which the speaker is acutely conscious of the influence of the physical environment. In Byron’s poem, the forces of nature are larger and more powerful than the human figures, who are their subjects and who are vulnerable to natural elements. At the end of Byron’s “Written After Swimming from Sestos to Abydos,” the speaker reports that Leander “was drowned” and he himself has “the ague” (l. 21). The physical outcomes suffered by both men—for one, fatal and for the other, temporary—are caused by their defiance of the elements, choosing to swim across the “broad Hellespont” (l. 4), one for “Love” and the other for “Glory” (l. 16). In Yeats’ poem, the Irish airman who foresees his own death recognizes the danger of his current profession of flying a war plane, and is so certain that he will die among the elements that he immediately expresses this belief in the opening lines of the poem: “I know that I shall meet my fate/Somewhere among the clouds above” (ll. 1-2). Like the speaker in Lord Byron’s poem, the speaker in “An Irish Airman Foresees His Own Death” is acting for ideals larger than his own beliefs and interests, and there is a sense in both of these poems that the fate awaiting the speaker is inevitable, acceptable, and even necessary.
Despite these similarities, however, the two poems are also dramatically and distinctly different, and these differences are seen most clearly with respect to three specific poetic devices: language, images, and figures of speech. With respect to language, “An Irish Airman Foresees His Own Death” is direct, straightforward, and even simplistic. The language of the poem is plain and requires no deciphering, and the message of the poem is delivered in compact, compressed lines in which the economy of language is maximized through words that were chosen carefully by the poet. Though simple, the language is also intimate; the first person narration of the speaker allows the reader to enter directly into the speaker’s thoughts and come to know him well in a matter of just sixteen lines. In this way, the reader learns that the speaker is clear-headed and yet, at the same time, he is ambivalent or indifferent about what he is certain will be his fate. As he explains to the reader in candid and clear language, he neither hates his enemies nor loves those he has vowed to protect. The ambivalence is reinforced throughout the remainder of the poem by the pair of contrasts incorporated in each line. About his forecasted death, the speaker observes, “No likely end could bring them loss/Or leave them happier than before” (ll. 7-8). He goes on to say that “Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,/Nor public men, nor cheering crowds” (ll. 9-10), and that he has always sought to achieve balance in all aspects of his life. The natural end, then, is to balance life with “this death” (l. 16).
“An Irish Airman Foresees His Own Death” is altogether absent of figures of speech, and the images are as spare and simple as the words of the poem themselves. Through his calm and clear narrative style, the speaker is able to evoke visual images in the reader’s mind, but they are as balanced and as tempered as the speaker’s own attitude towards the death that he is predicting for himself. The reader can visualize the speaker up in the clouds, navigating his plane in a time of war. At the same time, though, because the speaker avoids any vivid metaphors or extreme imagery—such as attacking fighter jets, flaring bombs, or other direct assaults—such threats are left to the imagination of the reader. Rather than focusing on the threats, however, the reader is moved with the speaker to a place beyond immediate danger; in fact, the danger itself is not important. Instead, the calm acceptance of the speaker is the tone that has been conveyed, both through language and through the images and lack of metaphorical adornment in this poem.
Lord Byron’s “Written After Swimming From Sestos to Abydos,” while also a relatively calm and accepting meditation on death, is a more accomplished and effective poem than Yeats’ “An Irish Airman Foresees His Own Death.” The rationale for this argument is that Byron used the poetic devices of language, images, and figures of speech more creatively and to greater impact than did Yeats. Although there is something to be said for the spareness and compactness of Yeats’ poem, Byron’s poem is the far more engaging of the two poems. First, Byron’s poem demands a bit more of the reader than does Yeats’ poem. The language, images, and figures of speech all make reference to highly specific individuals and places. While the poem will not be rendered meaningless if the reader does not know who Leander is or any information about the Hellespont, the reader who does possess information about these references is likely to glean a deeper meaning from the poem.
The language of “Written After Swimming from Sestos to Abydos” is clear, but it is not quite as simplistic as that of Yeats’ poem. First, the diction of the poem is slightly more formal and even archaic when compared to that of “An Irishman Airman Foresees His Own Death.” Words such as “twere” and “thus” suggest days and epochs past, thus making the reader responsible for determining the temporal setting of the poem. The manner in which the speaker articulates the story he is telling is also somewhat more formal than modern speech; passive voice is prevalent. Second, the speaker of “Written After Swimming from Sestos to Abydos,” speaking in the first person, makes several asides during the course of the poem, interrupting the natural flow of the story that he is recounting for the reader. In the first stanza, for instance, while introducing the story of Leander, the speaker asks parenthetically, “What maid will not the tale remember?” (l. 3). Later in the poem, in the fourth stanza, the speaker makes another aside, casting aspersions on the veracity of the tale, which he calls “doubtful,” and mocking Leander, who swam “the rapid tide” (l. 13) in order to “woo—and Lord knows what beside” (l. 15). These asides, while injecting some humorous elements into a story that could be sobering, do serve to distract the reader’s attention somewhat. The complexity created by the asides demands that the reader pay careful attention to the poem; he or she must engage fully with the poem in order to understand it and grasp its meaning.
The use of carefully chosen adjectives helps the reader to visualize both Leander and the speaker crossing the chilly Hellespont, one for love and one for glory. Though the tale might well be one of which heroes would be made if told by a different speaker, the self-deprecation of Byron’s speaker—who denominates himself the “degenerate modern wretch” (l. 9)-- and his mocking of Leander, keeps the reader engaged because the anti-hero bent of the poem is not what one might expect. For all of these reasons, Byron’s poem is cleverer and, ultimately, more successful in engaging the reader and applying poetic devices than Yeats’ poem.
In poetry, writers have broad creative license to experiment with form, structure, and other literary devices. Three devices that are central to the development of a poem include language, images, and figures of speech. Comparing the poems “Written After Swimming from Sestos to Abydos” by Lord Byron and “An Irish Airman Foresees His Own Death” by William Butler Yeats, the reader arrives at the conclusion that Byron’s superior management of these three poetic devices result in a poem that is both more powerful and more beautiful, both in content and in craft, than that of Yeats. While beauty is ultimately in the eye of the beholder, this reader finds “Written After Swimming from Sestos to Abydos” to be both entertaining and serious, a thoughtful meditation on relationships and on death.
Works Cited:
I. Byron, Lord George Gordon. “Written After Swimming from Sestos to Abydos.”
II. Yeats, William Butler. “An Irish Airman Foresees His Own Death.”
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