The Tower

'The Tower' is one of Yeats' most influential collections, combining the intensely personal with wider political reflections. ‘The Tower’ begins with an exposition of the poet's fixation: how to escape aging. In "Sailing to Byzantium," he dreams of leaving Ireland, a young man's country, to be reincarnated as a singing mechanical bird in a Byzantine Court. In "The Tower," Yeats laments his lost love for Maude Gonne, and ruminates on how to reconcile the difference between his youthful spirit and his aging body. "Meditations in a Time of Civil War" and "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen" are the most explicitly historical poems of this collection; the former is an intensely personal account of Yeats' family history and his place in the Civil War, the second a more universal account of the chaos that gripped Ireland from 1922 to 1923.