The Tower — Commentary

In brief

W. B. Yeats’s The Tower came out from Macmillan in London early in 1928, when its author was sixty-two, a Nobel laureate and a senator of the Irish Free State. It has twenty-one titles, among them “Sailing to Byzantium”, “Leda and the Swan”, “Among School Children” and the two sequences that, to my mind, are the finest poems in English to come out of Ireland’s wars. Yeats went through it as a whole that spring and told Olivia Shakespear, in a letter of 25 April, that he was “astonished at its bitterness”.

The argument

The Tower is usually summed up as old age against art. That is true and undersells it. What makes the book great is that it will not stay with its own conclusions. The first poem sails away from the body to a city of gold. The second, on the very next pages, declares “I mock Plotinus’ thought” and insists that man made heaven out of “his bitter soul”.

Politics gets the same treatment. Yeats claims descent from “The people of Burke and of Grattan”, the Protestant Irish who were proud and free to refuse, and he loves their great houses without apology. Then he asks whether such places “take our greatness with our violence”. The snobbery is real, but the book’s own best lines are its prosecutors, and “We had fed the heart on fantasies” is said in the first person plural by the co-author of Cathleen ni Houlihan.

The shape of the book

The dates printed at the foot of the first four poems run backwards: 1927, 1926, 1923, 1919. The volume opens with the old man’s decision and then descends, through the tower and the civil war, to the earlier violence that produced it. The war is the thing beneath the wish to escape.

A run of small poems follows, then a group of annunciations: “Two Songs from a Play”, “Wisdom” and “Leda and the Swan”, each a god breaking into history. The last third belongs to old men singing, with “A Man Young and Old” and a Sophocles chorus ending “The second best’s a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.” Yeats then closes on the occult: “The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid”, a disguised account of his wife’s automatic writing, and “All Souls’ Night”, which he subtitled an epilogue to A Vision. A book that began by asking how to die ends by calling up the dead for a drink.

Sailing to Byzantium

“That is no country for old men” is the book’s first sentence. In a draft script for a BBC broadcast in 1931 Yeats said “it is right for an old man to make his soul”, and explained the choice of city through Ireland: when Irish monks were making the Book of Kells, Byzantium was the centre of European civilisation. A Vision says that given a month of antiquity he would spend it there, a little before Justinian opened St Sophia. He had seen the mosaics at Ravenna in 1907 and at Monreale in 1925, and they are the “gold mosaic of a wall” in the third stanza.

The four stanzas of ottava rima are a case against themselves. Yeats dismisses the living world, and in doing it writes “the mackerel-crowded seas”, a phrase with more appetite in it than anything in the holy city. He begs to be gathered “Into the artifice of eternity”, his heart “fastened to a dying animal”. Then the last stanza gives the game away. Out of nature, he will be a golden bird, singing to keep an emperor awake, and what it sings is “Of what is past, or passing, or to come”: time, the thing he left to get away from. Thomas Sturge Moore, who designed the book’s cover, later objected to the goldsmith’s bird, and Yeats answered with another poem, “Byzantium”.

The civil war

The Anglo-Irish Treaty split the independence movement, and from 28 June 1922 to 24 May 1923 the new Free State fought the anti-Treaty IRA, the “Irregulars”. Yeats had bought his tower at Ballylee in County Galway in 1917 for £35, and he was living there with his wife and two small children when the fighting began. His own note reports that the Republicans blew up the bridge one midnight, forbade the family to leave the house, and said “Goodnight, thank you” as though they had been given it. That year his windows in Merrion Square, Dublin, were shot out as well; he had just become a senator.

“Meditations in Time of Civil War” is seven poems that move from the idea of a house to the actual one under siege. “Ancestral Houses” wonders whether the glory of the rich is only an empty sea-shell. “The Road at My Door” is the plainest: “An affable Irregular” cracks jokes, “A brown Lieutenant” stands at the door, and Yeats complains of the weather and counts moor-hens “To silence the envy in my thought”. Envy is the honest word. “The Stare’s Nest by My Window” has the refrain “Come build in the empty house of the stare”, and its news is what news is in a civil war: “Yet no clear fact to be discerned”. In the last poem he catches himself almost crying for vengeance with the mob. Seamus Heaney gave “The Stare’s Nest” a central place in his Nobel lecture of 1995, hearing in that refrain both strength and an acknowledgement of dissolution.

“Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” is the fiercer and the earlier work, despite the title. It looks back at the peaceful years before 1914, when “We too had many pretty toys when young”, and arrives at “a drunken soldiery” leaving a mother “To crawl in her own blood”. It was probably shaped by the killing of Eileen Quinn, shot on 1 November 1920 at Kiltartan, close to Lady Gregory’s Coole, while holding her child. People who thought they had reformed the world turn out to be “weasels fighting in a hole”, the speaker among them. “Man is in love and loves what vanishes” is what is left.

Leda and the Swan

George Russell, editor of the Irish Statesman, asked Yeats for a poem for his political review. Yeats began thinking of a violent annunciation from above, and his note says that as he wrote “bird and lady took such possession of the scene that all politics went out of it”. A first version was done at Coole in September 1923, four months after the war ended. It was first called “Annunciation”, it proved too hot for Russell, and it appeared in 1924 elsewhere, in The Dial and the Dublin review To-morrow. This edition prints it dated 1928.

Fourteen lines turn the rape into a theory of history. Zeus’s assault engenders Helen and so “The broken wall, the burning roof and tower / And Agamemnon dead.” The line snaps there on the page. Everything turns on the last question, “Did she put on his knowledge with his power”, which the poem declines to answer. After the preceding pages, nobody will believe that politics went out of it.

Elizabeth Cullingford’s essay “Pornography and Canonicity” (1994) argued that canonical standing has shielded the poem from the censure a work legitimising violence against women would otherwise get. I think she is right that the “loosening thighs” are written with relish, and that it does not end the matter: the “terrified vague fingers” are Leda’s too.

Among School Children

In February 1926 Senator Yeats visited St Otteran’s, a Sisters of Mercy school in Waterford run on Montessori lines, and in March he noted a “Topic for poem”. The opening is drily exact: the children stare at “A sixty year old smiling public man”. Then, in the second stanza, a “Ledæan body” rises in memory, the woman readers have always taken to be Maud Gonne, and the swan of the earlier poem comes into the schoolroom. She once told him a childhood grief, and he looks at the little girls and wonders whether she stood so.

The poem then climbs. A mother would not think her son worth the pain if she saw him at sixty. Plato, Aristotle and Pythagoras are reduced to “Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird”. The last stanza imagines work that does not wreck the body, and ends: “O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, / How can we know the dancer from the dance?”

Cleanth Brooks ended the readings in The Well Wrought Urn (1947) with this poem, taking tree and dancer as images of organic unity. Paul de Man, in Allegories of Reading (1979), replied that the line can also be a real question, in which case it means something opposite, and grammar cannot decide. The question is better than either answer: it comes from a man who has spent eight stanzas finding out how badly body and soul fit, and it sounds like a hope.

Yeats and Joyce

James Joyce and Yeats met in Dublin in the autumn of 1902, when Joyce was twenty. He had already attacked Yeats’s theatre in “The Day of the Rabblement” (1901), and he also knew Yeats by heart; “Who Goes with Fergus?” is the song Stephen Dedalus sang to his dying mother in the first chapter of Ulysses. George Russell arranged the meeting. According to R. F. Foster, they met outside the National Library and moved to a café in O’Connell Street.

What was said comes down to us through Yeats’s slightly fictionalised account, an unpublished preface meant for Ideas of Good and Evil. Joyce asks why he makes speeches, why he meddles in politics, why he gives his stories historical settings, and how old he is. Yeats takes off a year. Then comes the line: “I have met you too late. You are too old.” Joyce later denied it. Richard Ellmann was shown the preface by Yeats’s widow in 1945, and it set the tone of his great biography; some later scholars think it set too much of it.

Yeats behaved better than the legend. On 2 December 1902 he met Joyce off the Irish Mail in London, gave him breakfast, took him round editors and to Arthur Symons, and gave him an address in Paris for Maud Gonne, which Joyce did not use. Joyce’s return was “The Holy Office” (1904), a broadside that mocks the Dublin writers, Yeats among them. Yeats nevertheless told Ezra Pound about him, which is how Pound found Joyce. In July 1915 he wrote to the Royal Literary Fund on Joyce’s behalf, and the Civil List award of £100 followed in 1916.

Reading Ulysses in 1922, Yeats wrote to Olivia Shakespear of “a cruel playful mind” and said “The Martello Tower pages are full of beauty”. So each man had a tower: Joyce’s for a few nights in 1904 and the first pages of his novel, Yeats’s for ten summers and this book. One bought a ruin in Ireland to hold on to it, the other wrote from abroad about what he had abandoned. When Yeats and Shaw founded the Irish Academy of Letters, Joyce refused to join. Yet in Paris, as Eugene Jolas remembered, he puzzled friends by reciting Yeats from memory and saying “No surrealist poet can equal that for imagination.” Ronald Schuchard tells the story. Joyce’s own small book of late poems, Pomes Penyeach, came out in 1927.

The people

The household

George Yeats, married in 1917, supplied through automatic writing the system of A Vision, and she is the wise bride of “The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid”. Their children Anne and Michael are the “woman and a man” of “My Descendants”; “A Prayer for My Son” asks for a guard on Michael’s cradle.

The ghosts

Part II of “The Tower” summons local figures, named in Yeats’s notes: Mrs. French, whose servant clipped a farmer’s ears; Mary Hynes and the blind poet Raftery, whose song drowned a man in Cloone bog; and Hanrahan, Yeats’s own invention, kept back to answer for love.

The All Souls’ dead

Three occult friends are called on. W. T. Horton appears here only as “H⸺”; Florence Farr, who went to teach in Ceylon, is named “Florence Emery”; and MacGregor Mathers is “half a lunatic, half knave”.

How it was made

Nearly everything here had appeared already, in Cuala Press pamphlets run by Yeats’s sisters, such as October Blast (1927), or in magazines; “The Tower” itself first appeared in T. S. Eliot’s Criterion in June 1927. The cover by Sturge Moore shows the tower and its reflection in gold on green, drawn from a photograph Yeats sent him; “a most rich, grave and beautiful design”, Yeats replied from Rapallo.

Yeats went on revising. This 1928 text is not quite the one in most anthologies: the second of the “Two Songs” is a single stanza here, without the ending added later, and Horton is not yet named.

Readers and critics

The book was well received, and Eliot, who had printed its title poem, called Yeats the greatest poet of his time in a tribute of 1935. Yeats’s fascination with authority in the Blueshirt years casts a shadow back on the pride of these pages, and “Meditations in Time of Civil War” is the best evidence for the prosecution as well as the defence.

Afterlives

A title for a thriller. Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men (2005) took its name from the first line.
The tower itself. The Yeatses left in 1929 and it fell into ruin. The Kiltartan Society, founded by Mary Hanley, led its restoration, and floods have closed it since, notably in 2009. Heaney called it “the most important public building in Ireland”.

How to read it

It is free. Yeats died in January 1939, so his work left copyright at the end of 2009 wherever the term is life plus seventy; this book entered the US public domain in 2024. Project Gutenberg transcribes the first edition, and Wikisource and LibriVox have it too. Lines are quoted here sparingly, so read the poems whole.
Read it in order, once. The anthologies lift the famous poems out, and the backward run of dates vanishes.
Read the notes. They are short, and one holds the blown-up bridge.
For help, use books. A. Norman Jeffares’s A Commentary on the Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats annotates line by line, and R. F. Foster’s W. B. Yeats: A Life gives the second volume to these years.