What do you think?
Rate this book
The Tower
The first edition of W. B. Yeats's The Tower appeared in bookstores in London on Valentine's Day, 1928. His English publisher printed just 2,000 copies of this slender volume of twenty-one poems, priced at six shillings. The book was immediately embraced by book buyers and critics alike, and it quickly became a bestseller.
Subsequent versions of the volume made various changes throughout, but this Scribner facsimile edition reproduces exactly that seminal first edition as it reached its earliest audience in 1928, adding an introduction and notes by esteemed Yeats scholar Richard J. Finneran.
Written between 1912 and 1927, these poems ("Sailing to Byzantium," "Leda and the Swan," and "Among School Children" among them) are today considered some of the best and most famous in the entire Yeats canon. As Virginia Woolf declared in her unsigned review of this collection, "Mr. Yeats has never written more exactly and more passionately."
Subsequent versions of the volume made various changes throughout, but this Scribner facsimile edition reproduces exactly that seminal first edition as it reached its earliest audience in 1928, adding an introduction and notes by esteemed Yeats scholar Richard J. Finneran.
Written between 1912 and 1927, these poems ("Sailing to Byzantium," "Leda and the Swan," and "Among School Children" among them) are today considered some of the best and most famous in the entire Yeats canon. As Virginia Woolf declared in her unsigned review of this collection, "Mr. Yeats has never written more exactly and more passionately."
134 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1928
64 people are currently reading
1917 people want to read
About the author
W.B. Yeats
2,043 books2,563 followersWilliam Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and dramatist, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years Yeats served as an Irish Senator for two terms. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival, and along with Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn founded the Abbey Theatre, serving as its chief during its early years. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for what the Nobel Committee described as "inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation." He was the first Irishman so honored. Yeats is generally considered one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize; such works include The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1929).
Yeats was born and educated in Dublin but spent his childhood in County Sligo. He studied poetry in his youth, and from an early age was fascinated by both Irish legends and the occult. Those topics feature in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the century. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and those slow paced and lyrical poems display debts to Edmund Spenser and Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as to the Pre-Raphaelite poets. From 1900, Yeats' poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life.
--from Wikipedia
Yeats was born and educated in Dublin but spent his childhood in County Sligo. He studied poetry in his youth, and from an early age was fascinated by both Irish legends and the occult. Those topics feature in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the century. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and those slow paced and lyrical poems display debts to Edmund Spenser and Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as to the Pre-Raphaelite poets. From 1900, Yeats' poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life.
--from Wikipedia
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 129 reviews
January 4, 2011
Snowed in, my girlfriend cut my hair in my kitchen and I read out loud from The Tower. Later that afternoon we trudged to a coffee shop through waist-high snow and I finished it over a cup of extremely strong coffee. The coffee-shop owner had The Kinks on.
October 19, 2025
Powerful verse. I particularly liked The Tower and A Man Young and Old. They both appeal to me in my growing dotage. I also spent a bit of time googling poem titles with analysis of the poems due to my complete lack of a classical education 😀
March 31, 2016
This is great poetry, great writing; even an imbecile like me can "feel" that. But I have to admit that it is beyond my ability to truly understand the meaning, the essence of what the poet was saying, and not just with this work but any poetry. So I just read, enjoy it (or not), and apply it to my life, my thoughts, my sensitivities (or not).
This volume is considered by scholars and critics to be some of Yeats best work, and he wrote this 5 years AFTER he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. No fading violet here; no resting on your laurels for Mr. Yeats.
This volume is considered by scholars and critics to be some of Yeats best work, and he wrote this 5 years AFTER he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. No fading violet here; no resting on your laurels for Mr. Yeats.
November 2, 2016
In my review of Seamus Heaney's Death of a Naturalist, I casually referred to "Yeatsian idealism," to contrast the earlier poet's elite modernism with Heaney's later and more modest poetic of the turf and bog. Facility with such phrases as "Yeatsian idealism" is the fruit of a general education, but as poetry is in the particulars, it is good for us generally educated to re-consult (or sometimes, frankly, consult for the first time) the primary sources to ensure that we actually know what we're talking about.
To that end, I decided to go beyond the frequently anthologized or selected and read an original volume by Yeats; charmed by its green-and-gold mirrored deco design (by Thomas Sturge Moore), I chose the relatively late The Tower of 1928. As the received story of Yeats's career goes, he began as an Aesthete and a nationalist, conjuring the Celtic Twilight in languorous post-Wildean lyricism; but events both public and private (the Irish war for independence and the subsequent civil war, World War I, his own tumultuous love affair with Maud Gonne, and his ongoing experiences with the occult) toughened his poetry into grave and austere meditations on history, violence, and the conflict between flesh and spirit. As John Carey wrote in Pure Pleasure , his lines "seem to have been graven on tablets of stone from the beginning of time." The Tower—a collection organized around Yeats's residence at Thoor Ballyllee, a Norman tower he bought in 1917—belongs to this later period of stern reflection.
How does my idealism thesis fare? I had in mind poems precisely like the collection's opener, "Sailing to Byzantium," in which the speaker, lamenting that his randy compatriots, both human and animal, are "caught in that sensual music" and so "neglect / monuments of unageing intellect," expresses his wish to cease to be human (with his heart "fastened to a dying animal") and to be reincarnated in "such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make"; he wants to become a mechanical bird upon a "golden bough" singing "Of what is past, or passing, or to come." So far, so idealist.
But the poem, in its praise for "the artifice of eternity," undoes all its certainties. For one thing, the speaker is clear about the contingent circumstance, namely, old age, that inspires his desire to exit the human:
The title poem, about Yeats's inhabitation of his tower in old age and about his dead and living neighbors and his own past work, makes the point still more sharply, that the soul must coexist with its incarnation, as the poet's avowed credo:
In "Among School Children," the poet, while a senator ("a sixty year old smiling public man") tours a school and envisions his former beloved as a girl; this inspires a reflection on their two souls' Platonic sympathy, and on how time and age ravage the child (shades of Wordsworth) and make mockery of all idealisms. The poet insults the thought of Plato, Aristotle, and Pythagoras in turn as, like himself, "Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird." But the poem's bitterness modulates into an image of earthly recompense. After observing that "nuns and mothers worship images"—which is to say that devotions to real and to ideal things come to same grief, because idea will always outstrip reality—the speaker then rebukes the divinities with a vision of secular redemption, wherein visible nature and humanity unite with the unseen spirit to produce an indivisible wholeness that cannot be divided into body and soul, real and ideal:
The famous sonnet "Leda and the Swan," about the rape of Leda by Zeus and the consequent engendering not only of Helen of Troy but of the whole Trojan War, voices the same lament that there can be no peace or beauty without war and violence, even as it suggests that the rapt victim of inhuman forces may thereby gain inhuman power:
Finally, there is the devastating "Nineteenth Hundred and Nineteen," a poem that has both the Irish war for independence and the Great War for its context. Here the poet scorns all our enlightened and progressive complacency, none of which has made the world a more humane place:
It is easy enough to say with Orwell that Yeats was a reactionary and a fascist. Edward Said, who did so much to redeem Yeats for the PC era by praising him in Culture and Imperialism as an anti-colonial poet meditating on Fanonian themes (in another mood, I might enter this into evidence for the fascist tendencies of identity politics), once wrote of "Swift's Tory Anarchy." The label might be applied to Yeats, who admired Swift: to his Tory elegy for a shattered culture of wholeness and authority, to his anarchic drive toward the shaping of a soul out of the chaos of experience. This conflict at the heart of his poetry is not reducible to idealism, obviously, though idealism is a necessary part of it, and it is not reducible to a single politics. And if the poet meant his wisdom only for the few, the books are widely available now, and their thought and feeling perhaps more widely shared that he suspected.
As for this collection qua collection: its less famous pieces are justly less famous, though the long penultimate poem, a blank-verse narrative set at the court of Haroun Al-Rashid, will interest autobiographical critics and those interested in the occult as it seems to dramatize (in a displaced historical fantasy) Yeats's marriage to a medium. Feminist critics will not care for the speaker's fear that his wife may become more than a vessel for spirits, may become an articulate intelligence who will challenge the seeming innocence of his love for her beauty ("A woman's beauty is a storm-tossed banner; / Under it wisdom stands"), but, in distinction to postcolonialism, there is probably no rescuing Yeats for feminism, despite my parenthetical effort above on the poet's identification with Leda.
Reading Yeats is like reading Hamlet or the King James Bible—it feels like perusing a dictionary of quotations. But no one knew better than did the poet himself that these ideal, unforgettable lines were wrenched out of painful material. We must take his greatness with his bitterness.
To that end, I decided to go beyond the frequently anthologized or selected and read an original volume by Yeats; charmed by its green-and-gold mirrored deco design (by Thomas Sturge Moore), I chose the relatively late The Tower of 1928. As the received story of Yeats's career goes, he began as an Aesthete and a nationalist, conjuring the Celtic Twilight in languorous post-Wildean lyricism; but events both public and private (the Irish war for independence and the subsequent civil war, World War I, his own tumultuous love affair with Maud Gonne, and his ongoing experiences with the occult) toughened his poetry into grave and austere meditations on history, violence, and the conflict between flesh and spirit. As John Carey wrote in Pure Pleasure , his lines "seem to have been graven on tablets of stone from the beginning of time." The Tower—a collection organized around Yeats's residence at Thoor Ballyllee, a Norman tower he bought in 1917—belongs to this later period of stern reflection.
How does my idealism thesis fare? I had in mind poems precisely like the collection's opener, "Sailing to Byzantium," in which the speaker, lamenting that his randy compatriots, both human and animal, are "caught in that sensual music" and so "neglect / monuments of unageing intellect," expresses his wish to cease to be human (with his heart "fastened to a dying animal") and to be reincarnated in "such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make"; he wants to become a mechanical bird upon a "golden bough" singing "Of what is past, or passing, or to come." So far, so idealist.
But the poem, in its praise for "the artifice of eternity," undoes all its certainties. For one thing, the speaker is clear about the contingent circumstance, namely, old age, that inspires his desire to exit the human:
An aged man is but a paltry thing,Then there is the mild comedy of his fantasy of being an avian robot in the next life, as if the tradition of visionary poetry had become so attenuated that Keats's nightingale and his urn have melded into one grotesque object. Finally, the speaker's fancied triumph is ambiguous, as in his golden and artificial form he will be singing "To keep a drowsy Emperor awake," which is to say that he will still be mired "in that sensual music," however "out of nature" his own person. Yeats's greatness inheres less in his idealism as such, but in his awareness of all that both inspires and menaces it. Who doesn't from time to time want to escape their "dying generations," and yet who can?
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress…
The title poem, about Yeats's inhabitation of his tower in old age and about his dead and living neighbors and his own past work, makes the point still more sharply, that the soul must coexist with its incarnation, as the poet's avowed credo:
And I declare my faith:In other words, our visions and imaginings, our utopias and godheads, arise from our experiences, our frailties, and our awful mortality itself—every image of the superhuman is a mirror of the human. Or, as he puts it in "Two Songs from a Play," a perfectly bizarre poem posing as an extract from a Euripidean drama about Jesus, "Whatever flames upon the night / Man's own resinous heart has fed."
I mock Plotinus’ thought
And cry in Plato’s teeth,
Death and life were not
Till man made up the whole,
Made lock, stock and barrel
Out of his bitter soul,
Aye, sun and moon and star, all,
And further add to that
That, being dead, we rise,
Dream and so create
Translunar Paradise.
I have prepared my peace
With learned Italian things
And the proud stones of Greece,
Poet’s imaginings
And memories of love,
Memories of the words of women,
All those things whereof
Man makes a superhuman
Mirror-resembling dream.
In "Among School Children," the poet, while a senator ("a sixty year old smiling public man") tours a school and envisions his former beloved as a girl; this inspires a reflection on their two souls' Platonic sympathy, and on how time and age ravage the child (shades of Wordsworth) and make mockery of all idealisms. The poet insults the thought of Plato, Aristotle, and Pythagoras in turn as, like himself, "Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird." But the poem's bitterness modulates into an image of earthly recompense. After observing that "nuns and mothers worship images"—which is to say that devotions to real and to ideal things come to same grief, because idea will always outstrip reality—the speaker then rebukes the divinities with a vision of secular redemption, wherein visible nature and humanity unite with the unseen spirit to produce an indivisible wholeness that cannot be divided into body and soul, real and ideal:
Labour is blossoming or dancing whereThe Ruskinian or even Marxian appeal to unalienated labor in the above stanza's first lines brings us to Yeats's politics. Though "Mediations in Time of Civil War" finds the poet expressing "envy in [his] thought" for the soldiers who pass by his door, the poem is largely a lament for his country's war-torn state ("We had fed the heart on fantasies, / The heart's grown brutal from the fare"), a condemnation of the politics of resentment that lead to civil violence (exemplified by the cry, "Vengeance for Jacques Molay," which Yeats seems to take as a battlecry of the enraged masses due to its connection to Freemasonry), and an insistence, reminiscent of Walter Benjamin's axiom on civilization and barbarism, that our beautiful possessions were born of violence and reared by labor, and that we must "take our greatness with our bitterness."
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
The famous sonnet "Leda and the Swan," about the rape of Leda by Zeus and the consequent engendering not only of Helen of Troy but of the whole Trojan War, voices the same lament that there can be no peace or beauty without war and violence, even as it suggests that the rapt victim of inhuman forces may thereby gain inhuman power:
Being so caught up,(While Yeats is one of the more masculinist poets, it should be noted that in one of the sonnet's several implied allegories, the inspired poet is the violated female figure rather than the male violator.)
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
Finally, there is the devastating "Nineteenth Hundred and Nineteen," a poem that has both the Irish war for independence and the Great War for its context. Here the poet scorns all our enlightened and progressive complacency, none of which has made the world a more humane place:
The night can sweat with terror as beforeThe poet's soul, figured as a swan, in this circumstance "leaps into the desolate heaven," and the poem ends in disgust with Salome and Alice Kyteler, with witchcraft and sensuality in a whirwind and wasteland of death.
We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,
And planned to bring the world under a rule,
Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.
It is easy enough to say with Orwell that Yeats was a reactionary and a fascist. Edward Said, who did so much to redeem Yeats for the PC era by praising him in Culture and Imperialism as an anti-colonial poet meditating on Fanonian themes (in another mood, I might enter this into evidence for the fascist tendencies of identity politics), once wrote of "Swift's Tory Anarchy." The label might be applied to Yeats, who admired Swift: to his Tory elegy for a shattered culture of wholeness and authority, to his anarchic drive toward the shaping of a soul out of the chaos of experience. This conflict at the heart of his poetry is not reducible to idealism, obviously, though idealism is a necessary part of it, and it is not reducible to a single politics. And if the poet meant his wisdom only for the few, the books are widely available now, and their thought and feeling perhaps more widely shared that he suspected.
As for this collection qua collection: its less famous pieces are justly less famous, though the long penultimate poem, a blank-verse narrative set at the court of Haroun Al-Rashid, will interest autobiographical critics and those interested in the occult as it seems to dramatize (in a displaced historical fantasy) Yeats's marriage to a medium. Feminist critics will not care for the speaker's fear that his wife may become more than a vessel for spirits, may become an articulate intelligence who will challenge the seeming innocence of his love for her beauty ("A woman's beauty is a storm-tossed banner; / Under it wisdom stands"), but, in distinction to postcolonialism, there is probably no rescuing Yeats for feminism, despite my parenthetical effort above on the poet's identification with Leda.
Reading Yeats is like reading Hamlet or the King James Bible—it feels like perusing a dictionary of quotations. But no one knew better than did the poet himself that these ideal, unforgettable lines were wrenched out of painful material. We must take his greatness with his bitterness.
September 17, 2023
Yeats i love you for writing pieces like "ephemera", "the wheel" and basically every piece on woman-man relationships and their entanglements with love, but i'm having trouble with this.
I'll blame this one on personal taste.
I'll blame this one on personal taste.
February 19, 2025
The Wheel
Through winter-time we call on spring,
And through the spring on summer call,
And when abounding hedges ring
Declare that winter's best of all;
And after that there's nothing good
Because the spring-time has not come -
Nor know that what disturbs our blood
Is but its longing for the tomb. (26)
Through winter-time we call on spring,
And through the spring on summer call,
And when abounding hedges ring
Declare that winter's best of all;
And after that there's nothing good
Because the spring-time has not come -
Nor know that what disturbs our blood
Is but its longing for the tomb. (26)
Read
June 12, 2022Yeats' best? The strength of Sailing to Byzantium alone is something to behold. Love of course for Among School Children (the most uncomfortable of WBY titles) Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen & the title poem
August 24, 2021
Libro in rilettura.
Cosa questo significhi proprio non so.
Ho letto prima le poesie. (Poesie?! poemi...) Comunque molto, molto belle.
La mia rilettura comincia con la pagina 5, 'Vita di Yeats' e già mi ci perdo: lo adoro, lui, W.B. proprio.
Ecco, volevo dirMelo.
La rilettura continuerà con il leggere le poesie con le note a seguito e contemporaneamente l'inglese 'a fronte'.
Sarà mai questo il modo giusto?
Cosa questo significhi proprio non so.
Ho letto prima le poesie. (Poesie?! poemi...) Comunque molto, molto belle.
La mia rilettura comincia con la pagina 5, 'Vita di Yeats' e già mi ci perdo: lo adoro, lui, W.B. proprio.
Ecco, volevo dirMelo.
La rilettura continuerà con il leggere le poesie con le note a seguito e contemporaneamente l'inglese 'a fronte'.
Sarà mai questo il modo giusto?
May 31, 2008
Is he the greatest English language poet of the 20th century? Maybe. The rankings don't matter. The beautiful music of these poems matters.
Read
June 25, 2023Every single Goodreads and Letterboxd comment is trying so hard to wittily pander to a niche pansexual ethos. I love when Daddy uses words with big biceps that never skip leg day to talk about how Ulysses or Meet the Fockers made Him feeel owu. I could write a manicured lit review and get ratchet with my precise-not-so-precise language and blow the brains off my single follower (hellow :) but I get triggered when people have opinions so I won't be a hypocrite. I wish I spoke Igbo so I could write instructions in this review for cultivating a lusty harvest of yuca. If William Butler were alive today he would have written this on his Only Fans.
Good words, great times. Reading The Tower is like entering a Chili's and spending the night finessing the entire menu. I enjoyed myself. People who rated anything below 4 stars are bots I invite you to report them for harassment treason and lewd behavior.
Good words, great times. Reading The Tower is like entering a Chili's and spending the night finessing the entire menu. I enjoyed myself. People who rated anything below 4 stars are bots I invite you to report them for harassment treason and lewd behavior.
March 3, 2024
The Tower es un libro fenomenal en profundidad, forma y trascendencia. Estoy convencido de que el poema que lleva su nombre es uno de los mejores que he leído en mi vida… quiero releer este libro muchas veces y diseminarlo completo, encontrar tanto de lo que lleva. Qué agradecido estoy de haberme topado con él 🌟🌈
Segunda lectura:
Sublime. Excelente. Aún mejor que la primera vez.
Segunda lectura:
Sublime. Excelente. Aún mejor que la primera vez.
August 13, 2018
Twenty one is a lucky number if you grabbed this book. That's how many poems you will find from the master of prose. If you haven't read Yeats, this is a great way to start.
July 14, 2019
Beautiful, but honestly spent with Wikipedia and a study guide in the other hand.
November 10, 2023
Does the imagination dwell the most
Upon a woman won or woman lost?
The collection had some nice poems, but I wasn't particularly into it 🤷♀️
July 3, 2022
Sometimes dark honesty: "I could recover if I shrieked... My heart's agony...To passing bird, but I am dumb...From human dignity." (Human Dignity) So sad. We should shriek more but shoot-to-kill less, imho. Not my favorite Yeats, but Yeats is my favorite poet. And sometimes he hurts so good. Besides, he is Hot and Smart. If I could turn back time, If I could find a way...
January 31, 2025
[8/10, versión original.] Martin K. Blackwood esta va por ti
March 11, 2019
A collection of 20 poems from 1928. Highlights - "sailing to byzantium" "the tower" "meditations in time of civil war" "nineteen hundred and nineteen" and "a man young and old"
June 1, 2018
Great book reads like Shakespeare. Speaks about legends and hidden secrets. Not recommended for those who have not read Shakespeare since a lot of it has metaphoric symbolism. The writing is great and truly made me feel everything that was presented.
September 7, 2021
I am not the biggest fan of Yeats. His interpretation of the Irish myths is something which I don't enjoy. I did enjoy reading these poems. Even though it felt a bit strange with all the name dropping of Homer.
March 21, 2022
I'm sorry I let Yeats' poetry go for so long. The Tower really is a wonderful collection.
Usually there's a few specific poems in a collection that are great with quite a few ok ones but The Tower is full of really beautifully written pieces.
Usually there's a few specific poems in a collection that are great with quite a few ok ones but The Tower is full of really beautifully written pieces.
January 25, 2014
Some of Yeats' poems in this collection are meaningful, but I have little use for poetry that is overly esoteric and filled with useless allusions for the sake of sounding exalted.
Read
April 20, 2020I find his lonely howling at the moon of age and love rather comforting.
October 18, 2025
we write not to fade away in silence
January 17, 2022
I
What shall I do with this absurdity—
O heart, O troubled heart—this caricature,
Decrepit age that has been tied to me
As to a dog’s tail?
Never had I more
Excited, passionate, fanatical
Imagination, nor an ear and eye
That more expected the impossible—
No, not in boyhood when with rod and fly,
Or the humbler worm, I climbed Ben Bulben’s back
And had the livelong summer day to spend.
It seems that I must bid the Muse go pack,
Choose Plato and Plotinus for a friend
Until imagination, ear and eye,
Can be content with argument and deal
In abstract things; or be derided by
A sort of battered kettle at the heel.
II
I pace upon the battlements and stare
On the foundations of a house, or where
Tree, like a sooty finger, starts from earth;
And send imagination forth
Under the day’s declining beam, and call
Images and memories
From ruin or from ancient trees,
For I would ask a question of them all.
Beyond that ridge lived Mrs. French, and once
When every silver candlestick or sconce
Lit up the dark mahogany and the wine,
A serving-man, that could divine
That most respected lady’s every wish,
Ran and with the garden shears
Clipped an insolent farmer’s ears
And brought them in a little covered dish.
Some few remembered still when I was young
A peasant girl commended by a song,
Who’d lived somewhere upon that rocky place,
And praised the colour of her face,
And had the greater joy in praising her,
Remembering that, if walked she there,
Farmers jostled at the fair
So great a glory did the song confer.
And certain men, being maddened by those rhymes,
Or else by toasting her a score of times,
Rose from the table and declared it right
To test their fancy by their sight;
But they mistook the brightness of the moon
For the prosaic light of day—
Music had driven their wits astray—
And one was drowned in the great bog of Cloone.
Strange, but the man who made the song was blind;
Yet, now I have considered it, I find
That nothing strange; the tragedy began
With Homer that was a blind man,
And Helen has all living hearts betrayed.
O may the moon and sunlight seem
One inextricable beam,
For if I triumph I must make men mad.
And I myself created Hanrahan
And drove him drunk or sober through the dawn
From somewhere in the neighbouring cottages.
Caught by an old man’s juggleries
He stumbled, tumbled, fumbled to and fro
And had but broken knees for hire
And horrible splendour of desire;
I thought it all out twenty years ago:
Good fellows shuffled cards in an old bawn;
And when that ancient ruffian’s turn was on
He so bewitched the cards under his thumb
That all but the one card became
A pack of hounds and not a pack of cards,
And that he changed into a hare.
Hanrahan rose in frenzy there
And followed up those baying creatures towards—
O towards I have forgotten what—enough!
I must recall a man that neither love
Nor music nor an enemy’s clipped ear
Could, he was so harried, cheer;
A figure that has grown so fabulous
There’s not a neighbour left to say
When he finished his dog’s day:
An ancient bankrupt master of this house.
Before that ruin came, for centuries,
Rough men-at-arms, cross-gartered to the knees
Or shod in iron, climbed the narrow stairs,
And certain men-at-arms there were
Whose images, in the Great Memory stored,
Come with loud cry and panting breast
To break upon a sleeper’s rest
While their great wooden dice beat on the board.
As I would question all, come all who can;
Come old, necessitous, half-mounted man;
And bring beauty’s blind rambling celebrant;
The red man the juggler sent
Through God-forsaken meadows; Mrs. French,
Gifted with so fine an ear;
The man drowned in a bog’s mire,
When mocking Muses chose the country wench.
Did all old men and women, rich and poor,
Who trod upon these rocks or passed this door,
Whether in public or in secret rage
As I do now against old age?
But I have found an answer in those eyes
That are impatient to be gone;
Go therefore; but leave Hanrahan,
For I need all his mighty memories.
Old lecher with a love on every wind,
Bring up out of that deep considering mind
All that you have discovered in the grave,
For it is certain that you have
Reckoned up every unforeknown, unseeing
Plunge, lured by a softening eye,
Or by a touch or a sigh,
Into the labyrinth of another’s being;
Does the imagination dwell the most
Upon a woman won or a woman lost?
If on the lost, admit you turned aside
From a great labyrinth out of pride,
Cowardice, some silly over-subtle thought
Or anything called conscience once;
And that if memory recur, the sun’s
Under eclipse and the day blotted out.
III
It is time that I wrote my will;
I choose upstanding men
That climb the streams until
The fountain leap, and at dawn
Drop their cast at the side
Of dripping stone; I declare
They shall inherit my pride,
The pride of people that were
Bound neither to Cause nor to State,
Neither to slaves that were spat on,
Nor to the tyrants that spat,
The people of Burke and of Grattan
That gave, though free to refuse—
Pride, like that of the morn,
When the headlong light is loose,
Or that of the fabulous horn,
Or that of the sudden shower
When all streams are dry,
Or that of the hour
When the swan must fix his eye
Upon a fading gleam,
Float out upon a long
Last reach of glittering stream
And there sing his last song.
And I declare my faith:
I mock Plotinus’ thought
And cry in Plato’s teeth,
Death and life were not
Till man made up the whole,
Made lock, stock and barrel
Out of his bitter soul,
Aye, sun and moon and star, all,
And further add to that
That, being dead, we rise,
Dream and so create
Translunar Paradise.
I have prepared my peace
With learned Italian things
And the proud stones of Greece,
Poet’s imaginings
And memories of love,
Memories of the words of women,
All those things whereof
Man makes a superhuman
Mirror-resembling dream.
As at the loophole there
The daws chatter and scream,
And drop twigs layer upon layer.
When they have mounted up,
The mother bird will rest
On their hollow top,
And so warm her wild nest.
I leave both faith and pride
To young upstanding men
Climbing the mountain-side,
That under bursting dawn
They may drop a fly;
Being of that metal made
Till it was broken by
This sedentary trade.
Now shall I make my soul,
Compelling it to study
In a learned school
Till the wreck of body,
Slow decay of blood,
Testy delirium
Or dull decrepitude,
Or what worse evil come—
The death of friends, or death
Of every brilliant eye
That made a catch in the breath—
Seem but the clouds of the sky
When the horizon fades,
Or a bird’s sleepy cry
Among the deepening shades.
What shall I do with this absurdity—
O heart, O troubled heart—this caricature,
Decrepit age that has been tied to me
As to a dog’s tail?
Never had I more
Excited, passionate, fanatical
Imagination, nor an ear and eye
That more expected the impossible—
No, not in boyhood when with rod and fly,
Or the humbler worm, I climbed Ben Bulben’s back
And had the livelong summer day to spend.
It seems that I must bid the Muse go pack,
Choose Plato and Plotinus for a friend
Until imagination, ear and eye,
Can be content with argument and deal
In abstract things; or be derided by
A sort of battered kettle at the heel.
II
I pace upon the battlements and stare
On the foundations of a house, or where
Tree, like a sooty finger, starts from earth;
And send imagination forth
Under the day’s declining beam, and call
Images and memories
From ruin or from ancient trees,
For I would ask a question of them all.
Beyond that ridge lived Mrs. French, and once
When every silver candlestick or sconce
Lit up the dark mahogany and the wine,
A serving-man, that could divine
That most respected lady’s every wish,
Ran and with the garden shears
Clipped an insolent farmer’s ears
And brought them in a little covered dish.
Some few remembered still when I was young
A peasant girl commended by a song,
Who’d lived somewhere upon that rocky place,
And praised the colour of her face,
And had the greater joy in praising her,
Remembering that, if walked she there,
Farmers jostled at the fair
So great a glory did the song confer.
And certain men, being maddened by those rhymes,
Or else by toasting her a score of times,
Rose from the table and declared it right
To test their fancy by their sight;
But they mistook the brightness of the moon
For the prosaic light of day—
Music had driven their wits astray—
And one was drowned in the great bog of Cloone.
Strange, but the man who made the song was blind;
Yet, now I have considered it, I find
That nothing strange; the tragedy began
With Homer that was a blind man,
And Helen has all living hearts betrayed.
O may the moon and sunlight seem
One inextricable beam,
For if I triumph I must make men mad.
And I myself created Hanrahan
And drove him drunk or sober through the dawn
From somewhere in the neighbouring cottages.
Caught by an old man’s juggleries
He stumbled, tumbled, fumbled to and fro
And had but broken knees for hire
And horrible splendour of desire;
I thought it all out twenty years ago:
Good fellows shuffled cards in an old bawn;
And when that ancient ruffian’s turn was on
He so bewitched the cards under his thumb
That all but the one card became
A pack of hounds and not a pack of cards,
And that he changed into a hare.
Hanrahan rose in frenzy there
And followed up those baying creatures towards—
O towards I have forgotten what—enough!
I must recall a man that neither love
Nor music nor an enemy’s clipped ear
Could, he was so harried, cheer;
A figure that has grown so fabulous
There’s not a neighbour left to say
When he finished his dog’s day:
An ancient bankrupt master of this house.
Before that ruin came, for centuries,
Rough men-at-arms, cross-gartered to the knees
Or shod in iron, climbed the narrow stairs,
And certain men-at-arms there were
Whose images, in the Great Memory stored,
Come with loud cry and panting breast
To break upon a sleeper’s rest
While their great wooden dice beat on the board.
As I would question all, come all who can;
Come old, necessitous, half-mounted man;
And bring beauty’s blind rambling celebrant;
The red man the juggler sent
Through God-forsaken meadows; Mrs. French,
Gifted with so fine an ear;
The man drowned in a bog’s mire,
When mocking Muses chose the country wench.
Did all old men and women, rich and poor,
Who trod upon these rocks or passed this door,
Whether in public or in secret rage
As I do now against old age?
But I have found an answer in those eyes
That are impatient to be gone;
Go therefore; but leave Hanrahan,
For I need all his mighty memories.
Old lecher with a love on every wind,
Bring up out of that deep considering mind
All that you have discovered in the grave,
For it is certain that you have
Reckoned up every unforeknown, unseeing
Plunge, lured by a softening eye,
Or by a touch or a sigh,
Into the labyrinth of another’s being;
Does the imagination dwell the most
Upon a woman won or a woman lost?
If on the lost, admit you turned aside
From a great labyrinth out of pride,
Cowardice, some silly over-subtle thought
Or anything called conscience once;
And that if memory recur, the sun’s
Under eclipse and the day blotted out.
III
It is time that I wrote my will;
I choose upstanding men
That climb the streams until
The fountain leap, and at dawn
Drop their cast at the side
Of dripping stone; I declare
They shall inherit my pride,
The pride of people that were
Bound neither to Cause nor to State,
Neither to slaves that were spat on,
Nor to the tyrants that spat,
The people of Burke and of Grattan
That gave, though free to refuse—
Pride, like that of the morn,
When the headlong light is loose,
Or that of the fabulous horn,
Or that of the sudden shower
When all streams are dry,
Or that of the hour
When the swan must fix his eye
Upon a fading gleam,
Float out upon a long
Last reach of glittering stream
And there sing his last song.
And I declare my faith:
I mock Plotinus’ thought
And cry in Plato’s teeth,
Death and life were not
Till man made up the whole,
Made lock, stock and barrel
Out of his bitter soul,
Aye, sun and moon and star, all,
And further add to that
That, being dead, we rise,
Dream and so create
Translunar Paradise.
I have prepared my peace
With learned Italian things
And the proud stones of Greece,
Poet’s imaginings
And memories of love,
Memories of the words of women,
All those things whereof
Man makes a superhuman
Mirror-resembling dream.
As at the loophole there
The daws chatter and scream,
And drop twigs layer upon layer.
When they have mounted up,
The mother bird will rest
On their hollow top,
And so warm her wild nest.
I leave both faith and pride
To young upstanding men
Climbing the mountain-side,
That under bursting dawn
They may drop a fly;
Being of that metal made
Till it was broken by
This sedentary trade.
Now shall I make my soul,
Compelling it to study
In a learned school
Till the wreck of body,
Slow decay of blood,
Testy delirium
Or dull decrepitude,
Or what worse evil come—
The death of friends, or death
Of every brilliant eye
That made a catch in the breath—
Seem but the clouds of the sky
When the horizon fades,
Or a bird’s sleepy cry
Among the deepening shades.
March 22, 2019
I'm quite fond of Yeats' imagery. He readily invokes Rome and the great civilizations of the Middle East, with language that doesn't transform them into just a clever reference. Rather, he manages to translate a (probably mostly imaginary) sense of majesty, into poetry. What I mean is maybe easiest to spot in 'Sailing to Byzantium', which is probably my favourite poem in this collection.
II
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
III
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
That's just an extract, but I can't help but get caught up in that feeling of high civilization. This recurs throughout the collection - and Yeats always manages to merge the high language with some element of human life. In 'Sailing to Byzantium', he merges it with death, but in others it is love, hope, etc. That's what I really like in this collection; the way Yeats creates a high civilization out of humanity's basic emotions.
II
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
III
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
That's just an extract, but I can't help but get caught up in that feeling of high civilization. This recurs throughout the collection - and Yeats always manages to merge the high language with some element of human life. In 'Sailing to Byzantium', he merges it with death, but in others it is love, hope, etc. That's what I really like in this collection; the way Yeats creates a high civilization out of humanity's basic emotions.
February 4, 2025
3.5🌟
There were a good few lines I really liked in this collection, and some sections I loved. Many poems seemed to go entirely over my head as to what on earth they were trying to say, but most had lines that I could enjoy even with the missing context. 'A Man Young and Old' was definitely my favourite, and I really liked the direction of 'The Hero, the Girl, and the Fool', although I wish that one was longer to properly get into it. I loved the theme of aging which seemed to appear a good few times.
It took me a while to get into this collection but I was really enjoying it from about the 25-70% mark, and then the last two poems I couldn't get into at all (would've been a higher rating if I enjoyed the ending more). I will admit that I have no attention span when it comes to reading older collections of poetry, so I listened to an audiobook of the collection while reading and highlighting a physical copy. This was a great idea until I quickly realised that I disliked a lot of the styles of the many narrators that were in the audiobook⚰️ And one I particularly didn't like disappeared for about an hour in the middle and then returned just to read the last two longer poems, so I admit that this mightn't be a coincidence.
Would definitely reread this in time, maybe I'd invest in the audible audiobook then.
There were a good few lines I really liked in this collection, and some sections I loved. Many poems seemed to go entirely over my head as to what on earth they were trying to say, but most had lines that I could enjoy even with the missing context. 'A Man Young and Old' was definitely my favourite, and I really liked the direction of 'The Hero, the Girl, and the Fool', although I wish that one was longer to properly get into it. I loved the theme of aging which seemed to appear a good few times.
It took me a while to get into this collection but I was really enjoying it from about the 25-70% mark, and then the last two poems I couldn't get into at all (would've been a higher rating if I enjoyed the ending more). I will admit that I have no attention span when it comes to reading older collections of poetry, so I listened to an audiobook of the collection while reading and highlighting a physical copy. This was a great idea until I quickly realised that I disliked a lot of the styles of the many narrators that were in the audiobook⚰️ And one I particularly didn't like disappeared for about an hour in the middle and then returned just to read the last two longer poems, so I admit that this mightn't be a coincidence.
Would definitely reread this in time, maybe I'd invest in the audible audiobook then.
August 31, 2023
But is there any comfort to be found?
Man is in love and loves what vanishes,
What more is there to say? That country round
None dared admit, if such a thought were his,
Incendiary or bigot could be found
To burn that stump on the Acropolis,
Or break in bits the famous ivories
Or traffic in the grasshoppers or bees? [35]
Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say;
Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day;
The second best's a gay goodnight and quickly turn away. [81]
September 23, 2025
cinnamon raisin rye bread with a bit of an unpleasant aftertaste, kerosene maybe? my favorite poem was The Hero The Girl and The Fool, but when I googled it I found out that the more popular version is from a later edition and was heavily revised :(
April 10, 2018
A beautiful edition from Penguin. Worth every penny for Sailing to Byzantium alone.
April 25, 2018
Calls for infinite re-readings.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 129 reviews