Collection: The Tower

Overview
Published in 1928, The Tower gathers many of W. B. Yeats's most enduring poems into a volume that crystallizes his late style. It is a book of stark self-scrutiny and bold myth-making, set against the violence and disillusion of the early twentieth century and driven by a determination to wrest permanence from flux. Across these poems Yeats grapples with age and desire, the wreckage of public life, and the possibility that art might outlast the body and the state. The result is a collection that binds Irish place and history to a visionary imagination, using classical and esoteric symbols to reframe modern experience.

Title and Context
The title refers to Thoor Ballylee, the medieval tower house in County Galway that Yeats restored and inhabited. The tower functions as literal dwelling and emblem: a vantage point, a fortress of mind, and a stark reminder of time’s attrition. Amid the aftermath of revolution and civil war in Ireland, the tower’s stone seems to promise endurance, yet its solitude also exposes the poet to memory’s assaults and the present’s alarms. The collection’s poems oscillate between withdrawal and engagement, retreat and reckoning.

Themes
Aging and the search for a form beyond decay are central. In “Sailing to Byzantium,” the aging speaker rejects the sensual world, “no country for old men”, and seeks an immortalized, crafted existence among Byzantium’s golden mosaics. Art becomes a salvation of sorts: the “artifice of eternity” that transforms transient life into emblem and song. The same longing for unity and permanence reappears in “Among School Children,” where a classroom visit prompts a meditation on the fissures between body and soul, thought and act, before it arrives at the radiant question of wholeness: how to tell dancer from dance.

History’s violence and cyclical upheaval haunt the volume. “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” confronts the shattering of order with bitter astonishment, measuring fragile ideals against marauding reality. The sequence “Meditations in Time of Civil War” threads the landscapes around the tower with reflections on factional strife, guardianship, and the doubtful uses of solitude. Mythic patterning refracts these crises: “Leda and the Swan” imagines the brutal coupling that begets the Trojan War, presenting history as birthed in terror and revelation, a turning of the gyres that underwrites Yeats’s philosophy in A Vision.

Style and Form
The poems inhabit a late style that is hard, ceremonious, and compressed. Yeats wields ottava rima with sinewy control in “Sailing to Byzantium” and “Among School Children,” a stately stanza whose argumentative turns anchor his meditations. Elsewhere he uses the sonnet’s tautness for “Leda and the Swan,” letting violent enjambments mimic the assault it narrates. The diction fuses colloquial bite with hieratic resonance; images, golden birds, spinning gyres, a stair, a mask, carry philosophical weight without surrendering lyric intensity.

Notable Poems
“The Tower” itself stages an elderly poet’s reckoning with memory, pride, rage, and the costs of knowledge, taking the building as emblem of self and art. “Sailing to Byzantium” imagines escape into a realm where crafted form supersedes flesh. “Among School Children” traces a path from personal reminiscence to ontological inquiry, ending in a vision of inseparability. “Leda and the Swan” compresses an epochal shift into fourteen lines of shock and prophecy. “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” and “Meditations in Time of Civil War” measure ideals against an Ireland convulsed by modernity’s violences.

Significance
The Tower secures Yeats’s place among modernism’s masters by reconciling the public and the visionary. It shows a poet transforming private symbols and local places into structures of thought that confront mortality, history, and the fate of art. The volume’s interplay of tower and city, civil war and Byzantium, gives a durable map of how to live amid disorder and how poetry can harden feeling into form without losing its pulse. Its poems have become touchstones for thinking about aging, art’s endurance, and the terrible splendor of historical change.