I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above
The title, of course, indicates that the speaker is a pilot. And the opening lines cement the expectation that he is a pilot during wartime. Inspired by an actual person the poet knew who did indeed die during combat, the opening lines also serve the foreground the expectation that this is not going to be merely an elegy in remembrance of a single individual victim of World War I. The poet builds upon the reality, but unleashes the facts enough to create the portrait of what is really and genuinely an Irish airman. He has universalized the main character as much as possible while also, in a remarkably display of the economics of language, giving this universal form a very specific identity. Right off the bat, this is a man who stands out from the crowd of soldiers: he goes in very much expecting to die. Not in some abstract “we all know we might not come back” sort of way: he knows he is headed for death in the air.
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor
The limitations of universality are immediate. This is, indeed, not merely about the multi-union effort to stem the tide of the dreaded Hun in Europe; this is about an Irish man. Even more so, he is an Irish man from the Kiltartan region of County Galway. It was truly one of the poorer regions of a desperately poor country. So, even though he has specified where in Ireland he hails from, he has broadened that limitation to include all of Ireland. This is an excellent display of the fundamental paradox of the poem: that it describes both an Irish airman in general terms while at the same time investing him with very specific attributes. And yet, at no point, it is really possible to narrow the speaker down. Not to the biographical origin or anyone else.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds
The most unexpected line of the poem also serves as the single greatest example of its paradox. At first, it seems very much like this line narrows down the identity of the speaker to a very select few of those who might qualify as an Irish airman. In a war that that can described at one level as being about nothing but nationalist pride, the very idea of not being driven to that war out of a strong sense of duty to one’s country or allegiance to one’s fellow countrymen almost verges on patriotic heresy. And yet, after the shock sinks in, the reality begins to bubble to the surface. Ireland was never really under any threat from the opposition troops.
World War I was fought mostly in the famed trenches of the European countryside and in the famed dogfights in the air above. Duty to protect Ireland—and the Irish—never actually became an issue. Might it have become an issue had those not directly threatened by the aggression—like the United States, for instance—not taken up arms? But no one knows for sure. Irish soldiers fought from Givenchy to Gallipoli, but they never fought specifically to protect their homeland. And so, then, one cannot help but wonder how many of those who did go to war might really—privately or only to one another—have expressed these very thoughts?
