Summary
The speaker enumerates a series of things that did not, in fact, spur him to fight in the war. It wasn't the dictates of the law, or a sense of duty, and it wasn't the influence of celebrities or of enthusiastic crowds. Instead, it was a kind of solitary drive to experience the joy of being up in the sky. Having considered his circumstances carefully, the speaker realized that his future years were going to be wasted anyway, just as his past years already had been. In contrast, the experience of living, and of dying, at war seems worthwhile.
Analysis
In this second half of the poem, Yeats balances two different goals. He needs to show that the speaker is abject and oppressed. He is fighting on behalf of a country to which he feels no ties, and will probably die in the process. Indeed, he is so accustomed to this form of inequality that he doesn't even seem to be distressed or surprised by his fate. Instead, it strikes him as part of the natural order of things. He is without hope, either for himself or for his countrymen. By emphasizing this, Yeats makes a political point about the injustice of British rule in Ireland, and about war more broadly. The sheer bleakness of the airman's situation functions as a call to action, reminding readers of the urgency of Ireland's political situation. In this way, the poem fits neatly into Yeats's oeuvre, and specifically his political work. This poem, alongside famous works such as "Easter 1916" and "In Memory of Eva Gore Booth and Con Markiewicz," has a clear political stance and aim: the liberation and sovereignty of Ireland.
On the other hand, this poem also seeks to memorialize an individual, providing some degree of solace or at least nuanced understanding in the wake of a death. It attempts to inject dignity and agency into its speaker despite his abjection, offering him back his individuality even while emphasizing the way that his autonomy has been taken from him. This is true on a broader contextual level, since the poem responded to the death of a real individual: Robert Gregory, the son of Yeats's friend Lady Augusta Gregory. Even without knowledge of this additional context, though, this project of dignifying the speaker is important. It suggests that, despite unjust circumstances, Ireland's people retain their humanity and complexity.
How, then, does Yeats balance these two differing goals? He does so first by splitting his elegy in half. The work consists of two long sentences of equal length. The first of these sentences focuses more on the victimhood and despair of the speaker and the Irish people. The second, meanwhile, focuses primarily on the speaker's dignity and individuality. First, the speaker reasserts his individual will by denying the impact of propagandistic or authoritarian outside forces on him. He makes clear that he was neither forced into war by the law, nor emotionally manipulated into it by manufactured patriotism and cultural pressure. Through this assertion, Yeats suggests that the speaker is still capable of making his own decisions even within a life circumscribed by wider political circumstances. Yeats also tells us that the speaker retains, if nothing else, a stark and clear-eyed understanding of the world around him. He does not, at the very least, buy into the political ideologies that oppress him. Instead, he is driven by the single thing over which he does seem to have real control: in-the-moment, embodied experience. While he has ended up in life-threatening circumstances due to a geopolitical reality outside of his control, he still lays claim to the "lonely impulse of delight" that overtakes him in the air. Brushes with death become an adrenaline-filled escape from external control: through death, the speaker gets the choice to opt out of his political circumstances, and gets to experience a momentary thrill belonging only to him.
