Speaker
The speaker of this dramatic monologue narrated in the first person is fighter pilot during World War I from the Irish county of Kiltartan Cross. It is well-established that Yeats was inspired to write his poem upon hearing the news that Major Robert Gregory, the much-admired son of a woman the poet had known since childhood, had been killed in action as a member of the Royal Flying Corps. Gregory and the poem’s speaker, however, are not to be assumed as one and the same because Yeats makes the conscious decision to make his pilot a more anonymously idiosyncratic representative of all those fighting in the war. He is presented distinctly as a man who willingly goes off to kill not out of personal hostility to the enemy, nor out of duty to his country, nor as the result of psychological pressure resulting from hysterical propaganda, but simply as the consequence of an impulse all his own. The opening lines serve to invest this impulse with a foundation fatalistic acceptance that his fate will be to die.
