John "Paddy" Hemingway died this St. Patrick's day. Dublin born, and in Dublin he died, but he was in the news because he was the last surviving RAF pilot from the Battle of Britain during WWII.
I immediately thought of this Yeats poem, about a fatalistic Irish pilot during WWI who flew into battle having no love for the British Empire. His Wikipedia summary mentions nothing about his weighing of the enormous risks he took in RAF battles, but a recounting of the number of times he was shot down and got back to flying again makes me think he'd accepted his death as a probable result of his service. Fate had sport with him, he lived to be 105.
In his honor then, I performed Yeats poem with music I wrote this week. The Parlando Project has done over 800 of these combinations over the years, using various words (mostly literary poetry) with music in different styles. You can hear any of them and read about our encounter with the words at our blog and archives, located at frankhudson.org
