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Tuesday
Yesterday Julia and I visited Dublin’s Emigration Museum, from which I learned that Ireland’s major export has been—its people.
Since at least the 17th century, the Irish have been fleeing the island, with numbers in the millions. Sometimes the cause has been religious persecution, sometimes political, sometimes famine, sometimes civil strife, and always, it seems, poverty. Thankfully, things finally appear to have turned around in the 21st century.
Of the many options open to Irish immigrants, one has been the military, and there was a special room dedicated to Irish who have enlisted to fight for foreign powers (including England). I fully expected to see W.B. Yeats’s “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” somewhere in this particular exhibit but was disappointed. Perhaps the poem is too indifferent to Ireland and its fate for a museum like this. After all, the airman tells us that he’s not doing this for his countrymen, who will not be in the least affected by what he does. “Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,” he tells us, “nor public men, nor cheering crowds.”
Instead he is driven by “a lonely impulse of delight,” and that impulse outweighs both past and future, even though the future contains death.
Yet for all his shrugging off of external factors, the airman is very specific about who he is: “My country is Kiltartan Cross,/ My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor.” This is one thing I have been learning about Irish emigration, which was emphasized over and over by the museum: no matter how determined people have been to leave the country, they always take something of it with them.
An Irish Airman Foresees His Death
By W.B. Yeats
I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public 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.
