The Dancer and the Dance: A Book of Distinctions

William Butler Yeats: The Tower: A Facsimile Edition

William Butler Yeats The Tower: A Facsimile Edition I say to the musicians: ‘Lose my words in patterns of sound as the name of God is lost in Arabian arabesques. They are a secret between the singers, myself, yourselves. . . .’ —W.B. Yeats, introduction to King of the Great Clock Tower, quoted in F.A.C. Wilson, W.B. Yeats and Tradition In 1928—the year he turned sixty-three—the world-famous poet William Butler Yeats published a slim, beautifully-produced volume called TheTower. Yeats had received the Nobel Prize in 1923, and the book was awaited with considerable anticipation. The book’s title referred explicitly to “Thoor Ballylee,” a derelict Norman stone tower located near Coole Park, the estate owned by Yeats’ friend Lady Gregory. Yeats had purchased Thoor Ballylee in 1917. After the tower was restored, it became a summer home for himself and his wife, Georgie Hyde-Lees. T. Sturge Moore’s beautiful image on the cover of The Tower shows Thoor Ballylee reflected in the still water below it. The image suggests both Yeats’ poetic self-reflection—the meditative quality of his verse—and the hermetic tag, “As above, so below.” The Tower contains some of what were to be the poet’s most famous, most explicated poems: “Sailing to Byzantium,” the title poem, “Meditations in Time of Civil War,” “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” “Leda and the Swan,” and—last but far from least—“Among School Children.” Yeats critic M.L. Rosenthal called The Tower “Yeats’ finest single volume,” and the book became, Brenda Maddox tells us in Yeats’s Ghosts: The Secret Life ofW.B. Yeats, the poet’s “first best-seller.” Yeats himself was very pleased with The Tower’s reception. He wrote his friend Lady Gregory that “Tower is receiving great favour. Perhaps the reviewers know that I am so ill that I can be commended without future inconvenience . . . Even the Catholic Press is enthusiastic.” And he told Olivia Shakespear, “The Tower is a great success, two thousand copies in the first month, much the largest sale I have ever had. . . .” Seventy-six years after the first publication of The Tower, Scribner’s has come out with a facsimile edition with an introduction and two sets of notes 7 8 The Dancer and the Dance by Yeats scholar Richard J. Finneran. (Finneran has supplied us with notes to Yeats’ notes as well as notes to the poems themselves.) What can this new volume tell us about Yeats? Are any new insights possible in the case of a poet who has been the subject of so much intense critical scrutiny? The book opens with the famous opening line of “Sailing to Byzantium”— “That is no country for old men.The young . . .”—and those two terms, “old men,” “the young,” reverberate throughout the volume. In the very next poem, “The Tower,” the poet tells us that, though he is afflicted by “Decrepit age,” he is nevertheless in some sense “younger” than he has ever been: 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. . . . Recent biographers have pointed out Yeats’ none-too-circumspect, extremely problematical philandering as he aged. Is the combination of “Decrepit age” and violent youth—“Excited, passionate, fantastical / Imagination”—to some degree an indication, even an exploration, of that philandering? “With the easy chauvinism of his time,” Brenda Maddox writes, [Yeats] used his wife as business manager, nurse, real estate agent, hostess, editor, literary agent, and proofreader while allowing his sexual interests to drift elsewhere. One of his first affairs was with Dolly (Dorothy)Travers-Smith, an artist and scene-painter for the Abbey and the daughter of the automatic-writing medium Hester Travers-Smith. Yeats found Dolly “slim and red-lipped.” Friends were amused to watch him one day at a party at Lennox Robinson’s cottage try to put her in a trance. How does this slightly ridiculous philandering—this “faithlessness”—register in his poetry, if indeed it does at all? The Tower has one poem, “The Hero, The Girl, and the Fool,” which ends with the lines, When my days that have From cradle run to grave From grave to cradle run instead; When thoughts that a fool Has wound upon a spool Are but loose thread, are but...