Essay Questions

What reason for going to war does the speaker ultimately provide?

The speaker has unambiguously rejected political propaganda, the pride of his countrymen, conscription laws and even genuine patriotic duty as the reason for his going off to take part in a war he fervently believes he will not survive and which he really had no business fighting. His country was not at genuine risk of invasion when he joined and would never be at risk throughout the war. So what reason could possibly exist for going to war when right there in the title he tells the reader he knew before he left his homeland he was never coming back alive. What is left? What drove him to this madness?

The only clue appears in abstract symbolic form: “A lonely impulse of delight.” Some have interpreted this to symbolize the speaker’s sheer joy of being alone in the air in a plane. He delights in the flight. But there is little in the text to justify this conclusion. He goes on to add a little more information, further explaining that he had given serious contemplation to the matter which involved weighing all sides of the argument. The closest thing to solid explanation he gives is the suggestion that the rest of his life would be a waste. But it is a thin argument and unconvincing. The “lonely impulse” seems to be, when all is considered, the complex urge of human beings to their own self-destruction.

In what Presidential biography does this poem play a significant--and quite strange--role?

Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan is probably the strangest Presidential biography ever written. It is composed as a semi-fictionalized account by an entirely fictional narrator. And it reads more like a novel with several completely invented scenes. This poem is quoted twice in the book: once in connection with an actual film made when Reagan was on the cusp of stardom—International Squadron-- and, in a display of the biography’s strange hybrid quality, again in relation to a fictional screenplay titled “Tumult in the Clouds” which purports to have been “written” by the narrator:

“Already I saw my title, “Tumult in the Clouds,” streaming out of a bank of radiant cumulus, to the sound of the latter’s silvery voice [Reagan] reading Yeats:

Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,

Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,

A lonely impulse of delight

Drove to this tumult in the clouds.”

The utilization of the poem in this way appears to be intended to draw upon the strangeness of the poem itself in which patriotism itself is questioned as a necessity to get a war going. That Reagan was nicknamed “Dutch” but made much of his Irish ancestry combined with the fact that he became almost a conservative caricature of the liberal idea of a warmongering presence on top of the complexity of his reasons for being one of the few Hollywood stars not to serve overseas during World War II (it would seem to be a decision not made by him—unlike John Wayne, for instance—but a decision made for him because of a genuine vision problem) all seem to united to present the connection between the speaker and Reagan as an example of irony. Reagan comes across as exactly the opposite of the Irish airman in the poem: a guy who buys into the propaganda and whose purpose in fighting would be utterly unambiguous.

What is notably paradoxical about the title?

At first glance, the title of this poem is unusually direct: the reader knows it is about a pilot who not only knows he will die but foresees that death. But, does he really? There is no point in the poem at which he does actually die. Therefore, he does not so much foresee his death and merely predict it. And since he is talking about war, well, that’s hardly going out a limb, right? What is even more paradoxical is if one accepts the poem at the inherent promise of its title. If the title is to be taken literally, then wouldn’t that make the speaker already dead at the beginning of the poem? And yet the second line quite clearly makes that impossible: he admits he knows that he will die only to immediately confess that he doesn’t any idea where it happened. The poem ultimately proves that its title is actually not direct at all, but is open to myriad questions and interpretations about the meaning of language.