“I do not love”: Rethinking W.B. Yeats’s “Elegies” of Major Robert Gregory

Some recent scholarship insists that the four poems W.B. Yeats wrote touching the biography of Major Robert Gregory are classic representations of elegy. Yet, throughout these four “elegies”—“The Shepherd and the Goatherd,” “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,” “An Irish Airman Foresees his Death,” and the unpublished “Reprisals”—one can detect veiled (as well as shockingly naked) criticisms of Gregory. This paper explores the complicated, often thorny relationship between Yeats and Gregory and seeks to challenge the notion that Yeats ever cared to glorify Gregory in any of the four poems. “An Irish Airman Foresees his Death,” in particular, which is commonly read as a kind of ars poetica tribute to Gregory, is in fact an anti-war poem written by one of the era’s most outspoken disparagers of anti-war poetry.