I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan's poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
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;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.
Whether the Germans or the British win the war is a matter of utter indifference to Yeats's Irish airman. Even his own death is of no particular concern. The pilot's detachment is Olympian. Why then does he participate in the war? The motive, he says in the poem's most challenging phrase, is "a lonely impulse of delight."
There is more than one historical resonance to the word "lonely." Primarily, in this poem, it's the individual who feels himself to be separated from the mass of mankind, which in late Romantic thought transforms him into some sort of nascent artist. But "lonely" arises out of a second context: the solitude experienced by the self-sufficient warrior. In this second sense, "lonely" expresses a nostalgia for the days of chivalry or single combat that survived into the early twentieth century only in the skies when one skilled pilot faced another (on the ground, it was all inglorious machine guns, barbed wire, poison gas, trench warfare, and death by dysentery). "Impulse" is also a word with Romantic roots. Readers will recall Wordsworth's famous and extraordinarily irrational assertion that an "impulse from a vernal wood" could be a source of moral learning, where an "impulse" stands superior to clarity of thought or to consistency of logic. An "impulse" is a feeling or sentiment, not an argument, and so functions in this poem also, where the motives traditionally advanced for going to war (loyalty, patriotism, evidence that one's country is endangered, profit, law, duty, politics) are specifically disclaimed. For the Irish airman, a Wordsworthian "impulse" is sufficient--especially if it's an impulse of "delight." "Delight" signifies the thrill of the game as opposed to the dreariness of ordinary life, which is twice dismissed as merely "a waste of breath." "Delight" is a word that harks back to the art-for-art's-sake movement of Yeats's youth, though even the most prescient would not have foreseen that it would come to describe the death-defying or, in this case, suicidal artistry of the fighter pilot. In "An Irish Airman Foresees his Death," a "lonely impulse of delight" counterbalances other and more conventional experiences and patterns of thinking. Some will find the airman's reasoning immensely sad, others will judge it to be invigorating. Yeats himself does not tip his own hand.
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