It's Remembrance Day today and it made me reflect on this poem. As an Irishman who has lived in England for many years. I think the issue for Major Gregory is the fact that he is part of the ascendancy or Anglo-Irish. He is not English, not one of "Those that I guard I do not love" and in Ireland he is not part of the Catholic Irish nationalist majority on the island. While his countrymen may be "Kiltartan's poor" he is far removed from them by religion, class and history. In the sky as a pilot he is free of the difficult issues of his homeland and his class. As others have written this poem was written against the background of the Easter Rising. Yeats wrote of the rising in his poem Easter 1916 that "All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born" this "terrible beauty" signalled the end of Major Gregory's world