Yeats Changing of the Times

Over the fifteen or twenty years between Yeats' poems Adam's Curse and An Irish Airman Foresees His Death the subject of his writing changes dramatically. In the beginning, with Adam, Yeats writes about poets and how their work is not viewed like most other professions of the time. Although it may "take us hours", "stitching and unstitching", it is still better to go scrub floors or be a banker or schoolmaster. The women see their chore in live as "labour(ing) to be beautiful." A man, a poet, truly wants to love a woman with the ways of old, through romance and poems. Eventually though, love dies out. Eventually we all end up as lonely and hollow. This is the tale of a normal course of life and love, for a common man and woman.

In An Irish Airman Foresees His Death though, Yeats tells it how it is for the time period. His friend's son chose to serve his country and fight for freedom, and in doing so, gave up his life. He talks of being able to really please no one, not the enemy or the people for whom he fights, and feels like he wasted his previous time as well as the years he would have had if he had not chosen to fly. Basically in this time period, people were struggling to industrialize, and in doing so, many people had to leave their families and happy homes to work and serve in ways they may not have wanted to. In this instance, it seems as though this was an honorable thing for this young Irishman though.