I know that I shall meet my fate
The poem's opening line is disarmingly stark and blunt. The speaker implies that for him, death is not a possibility but an inevitability, with the word "fate" suggesting that he is destined to die at war. The sentence begins confidently with the word "I," the speaker fully claiming this fate without hesitation. Its straightforward declarative structure puts the speaker's unflinching attitude on display. Similarly, the line's clipped one-syllable words convey frankness and even a hint of impatience. From the beginning of the poem, we see that the speaker is aware of and unafraid of his future death.
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
The speaker here is referring to "Kiltartan's poor"—the poor residents of the small Irish area he calls home. Here, the speaker weighs the various possible results of the war, and concludes that every result is likely to leave the people of Kiltartan unaffected. They will neither suffer nor benefit from the war, because it is not a war fought on their behalf: Ireland, like the speaker himself, has simply been conscripted by virtue of Britain's investment in the war. The steady iambic tetrameter that carries throughout the poem increases the sense that the speaker possesses an unnerving, dissociative objectivity and calm.
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
Here, the speaker reveals that his calm in the face of death comes from a broader despair about his life in Ireland. Both his past and his future seem worthless and unimportant, making death into neither a loss nor a gain. Here, Yeats essentially repeats his phrasing: the latter of these two lines is a syntactically inverted version of the former one. This poetic device, called antimetabole, helps highlight parallels and juxtapose differences between two concepts. In this case, antimetabole helps drive home the speaker's despair, stressing the "waste of breath" that characterizes each scenario in his life.
