The Tower
by William Butler Yeats
Summary
This is a poetry collection, not a novel, so there is no plot to summarize, only what its poems set out to do and where they do it. Yeats had bought and restored a Norman tower in County Galway in 1917, a real stone keep he Gaelicized into Thoor Ballylee, and he uses it here as both a literal address and a private symbol: a tower he can climb to think, weathered by the same centuries the poems keep circling back to. Sailing to Byzantium opens the book with an aging man rejecting the mortal, sensual country he is too old for and imagining himself remade instead as a golden bird singing to Byzantine lords, artifice standing in for the immortality flesh cannot offer. Leda and the Swan compresses the Greek myth of Zeus's assault on Leda into fourteen violent lines that end by asking whether she absorbed any of the god's knowledge and power along with his force, a question the poem refuses to answer for her. Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen and the Meditations in Time of Civil War sequence turn from myth to the wreckage actually around Yeats as he wrote: the Irish War of Independence and the civil war that followed it, fought in sight of his own tower, ceremony and civilization set against guns being fired in the surrounding Galway countryside.
Reading the collection means moving between these registers, personal aging, classical myth, current political violence, often within a single poem, and it rewards slow, repeated reading more than a single pass; a reader coming to Yeats for the first time will get more from Sailing to Byzantium and Leda and the Swan alone than from working through the whole collection at once. It suits readers already familiar with Irish history in the early 1920s, since several poems assume that context rather than explaining it, and its formal control, tight stanzas holding genuinely unsettling images, is exactly what critics mean when they call this Yeats's most fully mastered book.
Historical Context & Significance
The Swedish Academy gave William Butler Yeats the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature for poetry that, in a highly artistic form, gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation, an award that arrived the year after the Irish Free State's founding and that Yeats treated as recognition for the new state as much as for himself. The Tower did not exist yet when he won the prize; he published it five years later, in 1928, making it his first major collection written and released after he had become a Nobel laureate rather than the book that earned him the honor.
Those five years mattered. Yeats served two terms as a senator of the Irish Free State, arguing publicly against measures he thought would alienate the Protestant minority, and he wrote most of these poems from inside the country's opening decade of self government rather than looking back at it from a distance. The Tower is now the collection critics reach for first to describe Yeats's mature style, the volume where his private symbolism and his public subject, an aging poet and a newly violent nation, finally lock together.