Summary
The speaker says that he knows he will die up in the clouds. This is despite the fact that he neither hates the people he is fighting against, nor loves the ones he is fighting for. His true countrymen live in the Irish parish of Kiltartan, and they won't be affected by the war, regardless of who wins.
Analysis
This first half of the poem is written entirely in one sentence, but it does not feel breathless or disorganized. Instead, the poem gains part of its unnerving power from its predictable, calm, balanced rhythm. Each line is written in a perfect iambic tetrameter—eight syllables with the stress falling on every second syllable. Every line is the same, and within each line, the balance of stressed versus unstressed syllables is entirely even. An ABAB rhyme scheme furthers the poem's feeling of steadiness and balance, with each line's ending sound meeting its rhyme exactly two lines afterward. This sound-based impression of balance and calm reflects the speaker's own attitude. He stares down his own oncoming death without hesitation or doubt. Moreover, he is able to weigh each possible future path and think clearly, considering, for instance, how exactly his countrymen might be affected by all the various possible outcomes of the war. Just as he balances these possible scenarios in his mind calmly and without fear, Yeats balances the meter and rhyme scheme of the poem. This predictability only makes the poem more disturbing, in many ways, since it creates a sense of inevitability just like the inevitable death that the speaker predicts.
The speaker's primary emotion as he anticipates death is not fear, dread, anger, or even excitement. Instead, he is surprisingly apathetic, treating death as more or less neutral. His neutrality actually extends to his feelings about the war in which he is currently fighting. This, the poem reveals, is because of the speaker's Irish nationality. It is in line five that the theme of Irish identity begins to emerge explicitly. The speaker explains that he comes from Ireland, pinpointing a specific area: the parish of Kiltartan. Because the speaker is Irish, he is obligated to fight in this war, but has no political investment in it, and will be unaffected by its results. Ireland, at the time this poem was written, remained under the control of the British. As a result, the speaker fights in the British army, towards which he feels no allegiance. Moreover, as the speaker emphasizes, Kiltartan itself is relatively obscure and poor. Even within Ireland, already powerless, Kiltartan bears an especially tenuous connection to both the causes motivating the war, and to the possible results of the war. Ireland is likely to remain powerless, and Kiltartan poor, whether or not the speaker fights in this war, whether or not Britain and its allies win, and indeed whether or not the speaker lives or dies.
