THE TOWER (1928): A FACSIMILE EDITION
By W.B. Yeats
With an introduction and notes by Richard J. Finneran
Scribner, $12, 134 pages
REVIEWED BY MARTIN RUBIN
Few poets have worked so hard to shape the edifice of their poetic oeuvre as William Butler Yeats. Arranging and rearranging his poems, moving this one so that it replied to that one, letting the light of another illuminate the ones before and after it: This calculated activity led one critic to dub Yeats’ “Collected Poems” the sacred book of his art.
The publication of a facsimile version of arguably the strongest collection to appear in Yeats’ lifetime, “The Tower” (1928), allows the 21st-century reader to experience this superb poet’s power at the height of his fame and capacity. As the veteran Yeats scholar Richard J. Finneran writes at the beginning of his useful introduction:
“A last minute shopper entering a London bookstore on Valentine’s Day in 1928 with six shillings to spend on a gift for his or her beloved could hardly have made a better investment — either poetically or financially — than one of the 2,000 copies of a volume Macmillan & Co. had published that morning: ’The Tower’ by W. B. Yeats …
“Doubtless not every lyric is a masterpiece, but how often have we been given between two covers such ’monuments of magnificence’ as ’Sailing to Byzantium,’ ’Leda and the Swan,’ and ’Among School Children’ — not to mention ’The Tower,’ ’Meditations in Time of Civil War,’ ’Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,’ or ’Two Songs from a Play’? ’A thing never known again,’ indeed.”
Mr. Finneran’s apt use of those two Yeats quotations demonstrates just how steeped he is in this poet and his works; and his sure touch is evident in the notes he has added to those Yeats himself provided three-quarters of a century ago.
In his introduction, Mr. Finneran shows how Yeats chose to order the poems within this particular volume and also how, in the following five years, he rearranged them into the form in which they would appear in the posthumous “Collected Poems” of 1940 that is his true monument.
But, as Mr. Finneran writes at the end of his introduction: “Perhaps [’The Tower (1928): A Facsimile Edition’] will also enable us to imagine how someone opening the pages of ’The Tower’ for the first time on Valentine’s Day in 1928 would have received the masterful poems therein.”
Masterful indeed. What magnificence of rhetoric, of imagery, and yes, of emotion. These pieces were written when the Irish poet was truly in his prime: newly-married in his fifties to a wife who bore him a son and a daughter and — probably of equal importance to him — hit upon the system (at least partially faked) of automatic writing to aid him in his composition.
The years of these poems were also the last of good health he would enjoy; shortly after this volume appeared, his constitution would begin to break down with the onset of the heart disease that would kill him a decade later.
But although Yeats talks of himself as an “aged man” in the splendid poem “Sailing to Byzantium” (my personal favorite among all his verse), and declares “It is time I wrote my will” in the volume’s title poem, intimations of mortality are less evident in “The Tower (1928)” than they will be in those works written from 1928 onwards.
Few of the other poems in “The Tower (1928)” can match “Meditations in Time of Civil War” for the gravitas of their content. “Meditations” bears the marks of being written when Yeats had lived through the sectarian violence following Irish independence and had experienced real danger when serving as an appointed senator in the Dail, or parliament.
A bridge on his property had actually been blown up when the family was in the house nearby, and he was personally targeted for assassination by the rejectionist elements opposed to the Treaty of Independence with Britain.
Keenly aware of his own pivotal role in inspiring if not actually fighting for Irish independence, Yeats summed up his ambivalence about how things had turned out in paired phrases near the beginning of “Meditations”: “take our greatness with our violence!”; “take our greatness with our bitterness.”
Later in the poem, he attempts a more nonchalant view of the conflict:
An affable Irregular,
A heavily built Falstaffan
man,
Comes cracking jokes of civil
war
As though to die by gunshot
were
The finest play under the sun.
A brown Lieutenant and his
men,
Half dressed in national
uniform,
Stand at my door, and I
complain
Of the foul weather, hail and
rain,
A pear tree broken by the
storm.
But some stanzas further on, the terrible reality is pictured unflinchingly:
A barricade of stone or of
wood:
Some fourteen days of civil
war;
Last night they trundled
down the road
That dead young soldier in his
blood:
and the poet despairingly concludes
We had fed the heart on
fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from
the fare,
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love …
And 80 years on in Irish history, with sectarian violence still flaring in parts of that island, his words have only taken on more resonance so as to be perhaps even more timely than when he penned them in 1923.
As Yeats’ fifties gave way to his sixties, he would win a Nobel Prize in Literature and as politician and writer assume that mask of the “sixty-year-old smiling public man” he pictures himself to be at the beginning of that beautiful, emotion-laden poem “Among School Children.”
His public persona notwithstanding, it is clear from the passion with which he evokes the past and lights up the present that for him all passion is anything but spent.
Like his compatriot George Bernard Shaw, who would describe his own Nobel Prize (two years after Yeats’) “as a lifebelt thrown to the swimmer after he has reached the shore,” the Irish poet could display a similar tart sense of irony at a worldly success that had been too long in coming:
Much did I rage when young,
Being by the world oppressed,
But now with flattering tongue
It speeds the parting guest.
And he did so in this four-line poem, entitled “Youth and Age” (penned the year following his receipt of what he termed in a less ironic mood “The Bounty of Sweden”), with admirable succinctness and not too much bitterness.
“The Tower (1928)” directs a spotlight onto some of Yeats’ finest and most celebrated poems. Yet it can also shine an unexpected light on a piece that has languished in plain sight here and perhaps still more so in the heavily-laden “Collected Poems.” The poem that Yeats chose to conclude this volume was one he had written in 1920, the year after his previous volume of poetry, “The Wild Swans at Coole,” had appeared.
“All Souls Night” is not by any measure one of Yeats’ best poems and it is certainly overshadowed by many of the jewels that precede it here. Yet I was particularly struck by its articulateness and grace, seeing it in this setting as I had never done before.
The lines which conclude its second stanza serve as a kind of manifesto of Yeats’ poetic quest and dance upon the page as only he can make words do:
Because I have a marvellous
thing to say,
A certain marvellous thing
None but the living mock,
Though not for sober ear;
It may be all that hear
Should laugh and weep an
hour upon the clock.
Martin Rubin is a writer and critic living in Pasadena, Calif.
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