The Tower (poem)

"The Tower" is a poem by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats. It is a passionate indictment of a man wrestling with age. It is the second poem in The Tower, a 1928 collection of Yeats's poems.

Below appears a small extract from the poem:

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, fantastical

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.

W.B.Yeats

W. B. Yeats

Poetry

Volumes	The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889) The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (1892) In the Seven Woods (1903) The Wild Swans at Coole (1919) Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921) The Tower (1928) The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)

Poems	"Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven" "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death" "Adam's Curse" "Blood and the Moon" "The Circus Animals' Desertion" "Down by the Salley Gardens" "A Drunken Man's Praise of Sobriety" "Easter, 1916" "Ego Dominus Tuus" "In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz" "Lake Isle of Innisfree" "On being asked for a War Poem" "Politics" "A Prayer for My Daughter" "Remorse for Intemperate Speech" "The Rose of Battle" "The Rose-Tree" "Sailing to Byzantium" "September 1913" "Song of the Old Mother" "The Fiddler of Dooney" "The Scholars" "The Second Coming" "The Song of the Happy Shepherd" "The Stolen Child" "Swift's Epitaph" "To the Rose upon the Rood of Time" "The Tower" "Under Ben Bulben "The Wanderings of Oisin" "The Wild Swans at Coole"

Plays

Other works

A Vision (1925)
"The Curse of the Fires and of the Shadows"
Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892–1935 (editor)

People

John Butler Yeats (father)
Susan Pollexfen (mother)
Jack Butler Yeats (brother)
Elizabeth Yeats (sister)
Lily Yeats (sister)
Maud Gonne (lover)
Georgie Hyde-Lees (wife)
Anne Yeats (daughter)
Michael Yeats (son)

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