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In Memory of Major Robert Gregory  

Author: William Butler Yeats  
Born: June 13, 1865; Sandymount, near Dublin, Ireland  
Died: January 28, 1939; Cap Martin, France  
Type of Poem: Elegy  

The Poem  

'"'In Memory of Major Robert Gregory'"' is William Butler Yeats"'"s elegy to Robert Gregory, an Irish airman who died in battle during World War I. Written in the first person, it is a poem of twelve stanzas, in octets, which is primarily composed in iambic pentameter but which also includes iambic tetrameter. Gregory was the only son of Lady Augusta Gregory, Yeats"'"s close colleague for two decades. They worked together as pivotal figures in the Irish Literary Revival and were among the founders of Dublin"'"s Abbey Theatre. Over the years, Yeats had relied upon Lady Gregory for financial, intellectual, and emotional support. Coole Park, her country estate in the west of Ireland, had been a second home to Yeats.  

Robert Gregory"'"s death in January, 1918, occurred on the eve of the move of Yeats and his wife into their new home, Thoor Ballylee, an old Norman tower not far from the Gregory estate. The death of '"'my dear friend"'"s dear son'"' leads the author to reflect upon friends from his past, who, because they are dead, cannot dine and talk together before going up the tower stairs to bed.  

The first dead friend he mentions is Lionel Johnson, whom Yeats had known from his earliest days as a writer and who had come to love '"'learning better than mankind.'"' Another absentee is John Synge, among the greatest of the Irish playwrights; his Playboy of the Western World had inflamed literary Dublin when first performed at the Abbey Theatre in 1907. Rather than catering to a romanticized or politically acceptable subject, Synge had chosen '"'the living world for text,'"' modeling Playboy of the Western World from the actual lives of peasants in Ireland"'"s western islands. George Pollexfen, Yeats"'"s uncle and a tie to his own Protestant Irish past, is the third who '"'cannot sup with us.'"' A horseman when young, Pollexfen had later '"'grown sluggish and contemplative.'"'  

Johnson, Synge, and Pollexfen were significant figures in Yeats"'"s life, but all had been dead for many years, and their '"'breathless faces seem to look/ Out of some old picture-book.'"' Gregory"'"s death, however, was different, and, coming so suddenly, it was impossible to believe that he '"'Could share in that discourtesy of death.'"' Gregory would have been the '"'heartiest welcomer'"' of Yeats and his wife to their new home because, better than the rest, he knew the tower and its stream, the bridge, the broken trees, the drinking cattle, and the water-hen.  

In a reference to the sixteenth century Renaissance figure Philip Sidney, a poet who also died in war and who was elegized by Edmund Spenser, Yeats"'"s Gregory personified the Renaissance man. Like Pollexfen, Gregory, too, was an athletic horseman. He was also a scholar and a soldier; in the poem, however, he is mainly the artist—a painter and a craftsman—who died in his youthful prime, an event that Yeats indicates should have been no surprise when he asks, '"'What made us dream that he could comb grey hair?'"' The poem closes with Yeats reflecting that he had intended to describe some of their dreams and accomplishments, but, in the end, he cannot do so, for Gregory"'"s death has stilled the poet"'"s voice.  

Forms and Devices  

'"'In Memory of Major Robert Gregory'"' has frequently been praised as being among Yeats"'"s greatest poems; some critics claim that it is the first of his poems that exhibits the full range of his poetic voice, a voice that later received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Although the poem"'"s meter varies slightly, the rhyme scheme is regular, with an ababcddc pattern throughout. On one level, the poem exhibits a straightforward literalness grounded in the actual lands of western Ireland. When the poet describes Thoor Ballylee, '"'The tower set on the stream"'"s edge'"' with its '"'narrow winding stair'"' and the '"'old storm-broken trees/ That cast their shadows upon road and bridge,'"' it is a faithful rendering of the landscape. Gregory was a physical product of those Irish counties, '"'born/ To cold Clare rock and Galway rock and thorn.'"'  

In opposition to the poem"'"s solid physicality, however, is the element of dream, of melancholy memory that infuses the poem and raises it beyond mere description. The opening stanza describes the poet reflecting on the past, remembering those gone—both long gone and recently gone—who cannot join him in the tower for talk and drink: '"'All, all are in my thoughts to-night being dead.'"' Reflecting on Gregory"'"s promise as an artist, the poet states that '"'We dreamed that a great painter had been born.'"' Continuing with these dreamlike qualities, Gregory"'"s hair is used in a synecdoche to represent the impossibility of his ever attaining a ripe old age when Yeats asks, '"'What made us dream that he could comb grey hair?'"'  

In one of the central stanzas of the poem, Yeats divides humankind into two categories: Some plod along over the many years, doing what they must do, while others make their contributions and quickly pass on. In a metaphor, he compares those who '"'burn damp faggots'"' to others, such as Gregory, who died in Italian skies at thirty-seven and who '"'may consume/ The entire combustible world . . ./ As though dried straw, and if we turn about/ The bare chimney is gone black out/ Because the work had finished in that flare.'"' The intensity of their lives is both the compensation for and the cause of its brevity.  

Themes and Meanings  

As in so much of Yeats"'"s work, one of the themes of '"'In Memory of Major Robert Gregory'"' is Yeats himself, the self-reflective artist and the Irishman. The tensions between Yeats (a Protestant Irishman) and the Catholic majority, and between his art and that of those who merely pandered to sentimental and patriotic feelings, existed throughout Yeats"'"s career. The tower of Thoor Ballylee, where he lived beginning in 1918, became a symbol for the artist"'"s isolation and for what might be called high culture in many of his later poems. However, if the tower is the symbol of the artist and his retreat from the mundane world in pursuit of his craft, what does it mean to be an artist in the complete sense, to '"'Climb up the narrow winding stair'"'?  

His choice of absent associates is revealing. All four—Johnson, Synge, Pollexfen, and Gregory—had been important in his life, but in the poem they also signify something other than their human realities. Johnson, an influence upon Yeats in the 1890"'"s, symbolizes the writer who renounces the real world for what Yeats called '"'the twilight world,'"' seeking the isolation supposedly required by the true artist. Synge, on the other hand, in his portrayal of the Aran islanders in The Playboy of the Western World , reached out and '"'chose the living world for text//…a race/ Passionate and simple like his heart.'"' Yeats"'"s uncle Pollexfen was not primarily a writer, but, in representing the Yeats and Pollexfen families, he symbolizes the passing Protestant Ascendancy which, '"'Having grown sluggish and contemplative,'"' is giving way to the Catholic majority.  

Gregory"'"s portrayal in the elegy is something more and something less than the historical Gregory: He becomes a Platonic figure who reconciles, in the poem, the incomplete personages of Johnson, Synge, and Pollexfen. Gregory, Yeats"'"s Renaissance man, is '"'Our Sidney,'"' another Philip Sidney, the statesman-diplomat, author of the epic prose romance Arcadia (c.1580) and a collection of love sonnets, Astrophel and Stella (1591), who also died in his thirties of a fatal battle wound. However, while Gregory exhibited all the qualities of '"'Soldier, scholar, horseman,'"' in the poet"'"s thoughts it is Gregory as the artist who is worthy of being memorialized, though he died as a soldier and a man of action.  

The younger Yeats had been active in radical political movements in Ireland, but over time he had distanced himself from those involvements, coming to defend the contributions that the Protestant Ascendancy were making to Ireland"'"s lasting culture. Yeats was not a soldier, and his life was not '"'finished in that flare'"' as was Gregory"'"s. Perhaps this was a cause for regret by Yeats when he wrote his elegy to Gregory, given the bloody sacrifices so many (such as Gregory in World War I and the Irish rebels in the Easter Rising of 1916) had made.  

The concluding stanza presents a somber world, '"'seeing how bitter is that wind/ That shakes the shutter.'"' In nostalgic loss, the poet looks back again to comment on his dead friends and their deeds. However, there is nothing he can say, for '"'that late death took all my heart for speech.'"' The historical Major Robert Gregory was, perhaps, less of a Renaissance man than the one portrayed in Yeats"'"s eloquent elegy, but the poem is also an elegy to the poet himself, alive but now alone in his tower in the emptier present, '"'For all that come into my mind are dead.'"'  

Essay by: Eugene Larson  
Source: Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition © 2002 by Salem Press, Inc.