"The Tower" by W.B. Yeats

Much of this book is damn hard to understand, but I’m going to give it my best shot.

This volume as a whole deals with aging, the prospect of an afterlife, and nostalgia for younger days. It is clear that aging weighed heavily on Yeats’s mind. Let’s see what the poems reveal about his thoughts on aging.

Sailing to Byzantium

I

That is no country for old men. The young

In on another’s arms, birds in the trees,

Those dying generations—at their song,

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Fish flesh or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten born and dies.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unaging intellect.

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

IV

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

To keep a drowsy emperor awake;

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

1927

I wrote out the whole poem because I think it is very important to see the poem’s form, especially the Roman numerals. The stanzas are separated by roman numerals, with each stanza containing eight lines in an abababcc rhyme scheme. Considering many of the other poems in the book are less strict with their forms, I paid special attention to this since its form likely ties into his obsession with age.

The roman numerals are especially important as they define the stanzas, which all end in periods, very clearly. This models our measure of age in which time is delineated in specific units: seconds, minutes, hours, days, years. Also, Yeats could have separated the stanzas easily using other characters such as solid lines, dots, etc. Instead, he chose to use Roman numerals, characters associated with the Ancients that function to count things out, just as we count out time with our arbitrary units. It is through the Roman numerals that he both illustrates the progression of time and his own feelings of old age.

Another thing to note is the strict attention to “rules” (rhyme scheme, 8 line stanzas, etc). Elder generations are often characterized as more disciplined, regimented, and sensible than the youth generation. The consistency within the form lends itself well to representing the assumed (and possibly stereotyped) characteristics of Yeats’s age group.

For context: 1927 was amidst the “flapper” trend in young women, with “The young in one another’s arms…” probably being a reference. If you are not familiar with the infamous flappers, they were young women who looked to break the rules of decency in 1920’s society and set their own trends. This included wearing makeup, dressing more provocatively, and drinking alcohol openly, something unheard of during the Prohibition Era.

After describing his current world, and the condition of the elderly in it, Yeats moves on to the supernatural: using words like “holy,” “soul,” and “eternity” multiple times. He pleads with the sages to lift him away from this place and meld his soul “Into the artifice of eternity.” Not only is the speaker dismayed with his age, but he is anxious to leave the world that has cast him aside.