The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
W. B. Yeats · poems ordered as one book, from “Sailing to Byzantium” to “All Souls’ Night”, set as an epilogue · Macmillan, London, 1928, the tower on its cover · the text as carried into the Collected Poems (1933) and Finneran’s edition of The Poems · scored on Yeats’s English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
A lyric book ordered by its poet: the wish for the city of artifice first, the testament that refuses it, the history the old man cannot leave, and the dead called in at the close; ottava rima, sonnet, ballad measure and the numbered sequence
Mythos
The tower as house of the ancestral line, of the solitary philosopher and of the civil war at its door; Byzantium as a city the poem constructs; Leda as the annunciation of an age, set against the Christian annunciation in “Two Songs from a Play”
Phase
Poems gathered over eight years, out of the Irish wars of 1919 to 1923 and the years after, published by Macmillan in 1928 and carried into the Collected Poems of 1933
Presentation
Opening with “Sailing to Byzantium” and closing with “All Souls’ Night” as an epilogue; between them “The Tower” in three parts, “Meditations in Time of Civil War” in seven, “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” in six, “A Man Young and Old” in eleven poems, and shorter lyrics
Register
From the grand stanza and the prayer to the sages to quick conversational tetrameters, the ballad measure, the slow bequest of a will, and the plain word set at the end of a long sentence; the voice always that of a man speaking
Scale
One old man’s mind and body, his house and family, a state at war with itself, the cycles of history from Troy to Byzantium, the sacred, and the stare, the moorhen and the chestnut-tree
Governing Proposition
An old man opens his book by refusing the country of the young and asking to be gathered into a city of artifice, then spends the rest of it unable to leave the world he refused: his own aged body, his undiminished desire, his tower, and a nation being born by violence on the road below it. The wager of the book is that the dying animal and the soul’s desire are one condition no philosophy dissolves, that the dreams of those who made a nation fed its brutality, the poet’s among them, and that only made things, a golden bird, a poem, a tower, a dance, can hold the antinomy, and only while they are being made.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“That is no country for old men.” The book opens on a refusal, and its first poem sets the condition that governs the rest: an old man, a body that is dying, and a desire that is not. The Tower was published by Macmillan in London in 1928, and Yeats made it as a book: its title, its emblem, its opening and its epilogue are his. On its cover stands the tower itself, a Norman keep in Galway that Yeats bought and restored, and the book makes it the house of three things at once: of an ancestral line, of a solitary philosopher at his table, and of a civil war fought at its door.
The work scored here is that book, the body of poems as Yeats ordered it, from “Sailing to Byzantium” to “All Souls’ Night”, which is set as an epilogue. Between them stand “The Tower” in three parts, “Meditations in Time of Civil War” in seven, “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” in six, “Leda and the Swan”, “Among School Children”, the eleven poems of “A Man Young and Old”, and shorter lyrics: “The Wheel”, “Youth and Age”, “The New Faces”, “A Prayer for My Son”, “Two Songs from a Play”, “Colonus’ Praise”, the poem on a black centaur painted by Edmund Dulac, and the slighter “Fragments”, “Wisdom”, “The Fool by the Roadside”, “Owen Aherne and His Dancers” and “The Three Monuments”. The text is the one carried into the Collected Poems of 1933 and into Finneran’s edition of The Poems.
“Sailing to Byzantium” is four stanzas of ottava rima, thirty-two lines, and each stanza makes one move: the country refused, the soul’s school, the prayer to the sages, the golden bird. The old man’s condition is set down plainly, “An aged man is but a paltry thing, / A tattered coat upon a stick, unless / Soul clap its hands and sing”, and the soul is to be taught by “monuments of its own magnificence”. The sages stand “in God’s holy fire”, and the soul that prays to them is “sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal”. The golden bird will sing “Of what is past, or passing, or to come”, and that last line answers the first stanza’s “Whatever is begotten, born, and dies”. The poem in its strict stanza is the made thing it asks to become.
Movement II
The book does not stay in Byzantium. “The Tower”, in three numbered parts, is the testament that refuses the wish. It meets the condition the first poem prayed to escape: “Decrepit age that has been tied to me / As to a dog’s tail”. What the first poem set out as prayer is said here as comedy and as rage. The old man will not give up the imagination, even as he composes his will.
The second part is a long survey in short-lined stanzas, its tetrameters quick and conversational. The third part is the testament, and the measure slows to the pace of a will. The poem’s three parts run at three speeds of one mind, and the change of measure is the change from the quarrel to the bequest.
What the testament keeps is what the first poem wished to be rid of. The soul in Byzantium asked to be gathered into artifice; the old man in the tower holds on to the imagination, and with it to the desire. The book has set its antinomy in its first two poems, and it does not resolve it. The body and the desire are one condition, and the rest of the book sees that condition from the tower, with the world below it.
Movement III
The world below is at war. “Meditations in Time of Civil War” is seven numbered parts, the first in ottava rima: “Ancestral Houses”, “My House”, “My Table”, “My Descendants”, “The Road at My Door”, “The Stare’s Nest by My Window”, and “I See Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart’s Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness”. The titles narrow as they go. The sequence begins with the great houses of an inherited order, and asks whether their greatness was ever more than bitterness and violence; it comes down through the poet’s own house, table and children to the road at his door and a crack in his wall, where a stare has built its nest.
On the road a dead young soldier is trundled past. The civil war is known as a narrowing of the field of vision, from inherited grandeur to a bird’s nest in a crack, and then it opens again into dread: in the last part the phantoms ride, and the speaker turns back to his own small tower. The poet does not stand outside what he sees. “We had fed the heart on fantasies, / The heart’s grown brutal from the fare”: the violence of a nation’s birth was fed by the dreams of those who made it, and he counts himself among the feeders.
“Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen”, six numbered parts, the first again in ottava rima, holds the drunken soldiery and the murdered mother, and it ends in the storm of the Sidhe and the evil figure of Robert Artisson. Its plainest lines are its hardest: “Man is in love and loves what vanishes, / What more is there to say?” The two sequences are the history the old man cannot leave, and the book does not let its speaker off the charge.
Movement IV
“Leda and the Swan” is a sonnet, fourteen lines, and it opens in mid-act with a noun phrase and a colon: “A sudden blow:”. The rape is told as it happens, “the great wings beating still”, and within a few lines the poem leaps from one act to the ruin of a civilisation: “The broken wall, the burning roof and tower / And Agamemnon dead”. The eleventh line is broken across the page. The line is cut as the history is cut, and the burning tower of Troy stands in a book whose emblem is a tower.
The sonnet makes one act the origin of an age. Its question is the one the poem leaves open, whether she put on his knowledge with his power, and readers have argued for nearly a century whether it can be answered. Beside it “Two Songs from a Play” sets the Christian annunciation against the Greek: the Magnus Annus, the turn from the Greek age to the Christian, and the Christ of the songs. Against any order found ready-made, the book sets its own claim: “Death and life were not / Till man made up the whole”. Meaning is made by man, not found.
The pattern under these poems, the gyre and its cycles of history, belongs to Yeats’s A Vision, and the book asserts it rather than shows it. The poems that rest on it most stand without it: Leda, Byzantium and the tower are built in the poems themselves. Round them the shorter pieces run in other measures, from “The Wheel”, “Youth and Age” and “The New Faces” to the ballad measures of “A Man Young and Old”, eleven poems of love and age. A few, “Fragments”, “Wisdom”, “Owen Aherne and His Dancers” and “The Three Monuments”, are slight, and the book could lose them with its knowledge little changed.
Movement V
“Among School Children” is eight stanzas of ottava rima, sixty-four lines. It begins with a sixty-year-old senator among children in a convent school, and it travels from that schoolroom to a labour “where / The body is not bruised to pleasure soul”. The form is the motion of a mind: a sentence carried across the eight lines of the stanza, the rhyme falling on plain words, the voice still that of a man speaking.
Its close is the book’s answer to its opening. “O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer”, it asks, and then: “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” The old man of Byzantium wanted to be taken out of the body into the artifice; here the body and the made thing cannot be told apart, and the antinomy is held, for a moment, in a thing that exists only while it is being made. Whether the poem closes in unity or in a question left open is one of the questions it has kept alive.
The book ends with “All Souls’ Night”, set as an epilogue: the poet calls his dead friends to a glass of muscatel to hear the marvellous thing he has to tell, the made thing set once more against the dying animal. The book’s reach came after it. Auden’s elegy of 1939 is to the poet whose late manner this book set; the early Larkin was Yeatsian before he turned away; Roethke, and later Heaney, Mahon and the Irish poets after them, wrote in its shadow and against it. Its words passed into common speech, and “no country for old men” titled a novel and a film.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test, taken poem by poem and then on the book. Inside the major poems almost nothing can go: in “Sailing to Byzantium” each stanza makes one move, the country refused, the soul’s school, the prayer to the sages, the golden bird, and the last line, “Of what is past, or passing, or to come”, answers the first stanza’s “Whatever is begotten, born, and dies”. The order argues too, from Byzantium as the wish to the ghosts called to the table at the close. What holds the axis is what the great poems carry with them. Counted by poems, perhaps a sixth of the book is permitted rather than required: “Owen Aherne and His Dancers”, “The Three Monuments”, “Wisdom”, “The Fool by the Roadside” and “Fragments” could leave the book with its knowledge little changed, and inside “The Tower” the testament of the third part runs on past its point before “Now shall I make my soul”.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds without the system. First, that the aged body and the undiminished desire are one condition no philosophy dissolves: the soul is “sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal”. Second, that violence returns into a civil order as soon as it loosens, fed by the dreams of those who made the nation: “We had fed the heart on fantasies, / The heart’s grown brutal from the fare”, and the poet counts himself among the feeders. The ancestral order is examined, not only mourned: its great houses were raised by “Bitter and violent men”. Third, that a life cannot be told from what it makes of itself: “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” What holds it below the top is the share of the gyres and their cycles, asserted rather than shown, and “Leda”, which raises the question of what the woman came to know and leaves it open.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Height and frequency both, and in every register. The transport of “Sailing to Byzantium”, up to the sages “standing in God’s holy fire”. The dreadful: the drunken soldiery and the murdered mother of “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen”, the evil figure of Robert Artisson, and the phantoms that close the “Meditations”. The violent: “A sudden blow: the great wings beating still”, and the leap from one act to “The broken wall, the burning roof and tower / And Agamemnon dead”. The plain: “Come build in the empty house of the stare.” The warm and grave close of “Among School Children”, “O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer”. What holds it off the top is the level middle of the book, where the slight pieces do not rise, and a few heights reached for rather than reached: the bequest of pride in the third part of “The Tower”, the apostrophes of “All Souls’ Night”.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Myth built, in three ways. The tower itself, a real Norman keep in Galway that Yeats bought and restored, is made the book’s emblem, house of the ancestral line, of the solitary philosopher and of the civil war at its door, and it stands on the cover. Byzantium is built as a place the poem constructs, a city of artifice where the soul is taught by “monuments of its own magnificence”. And “Leda” makes one act the origin of an age, set against the Christian annunciation in “Two Songs from a Play”: “I saw a staring virgin stand / Where holy Dionysus died”. The particular stays particular: a stare’s nest in a crack in the wall, a dead young soldier on the road. What holds it a step down is the private share. The gyre and its cycles belong to A Vision, and the poems summon them rather than contain them; the Black Centaur is a personal emblem, and the dead of All Souls’ Night are ghosts of a circle, not myths a culture lives by.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The inheritance is double: Yeats’s own Celtic Twilight, and the English stanza tradition. Within it the swerve is real. The stanza of Byron’s comedy is turned into the vehicle of the gravest public meditation, with a speaking syntax run against the rhyme. The stake was real too: an old public man staked a late book on the body’s rage and lust in age, on the sexual and the violent, while the wounds of a civil war were fresh. What holds the axis is that the larger turn was made before this book. The break with the Twilight came in Responsibilities (1914), and the public occasional poem in The Wild Swans at Coole and the books after it; this book deepens a manner it did not invent. And against the modernism of its decade it kept the inherited stanza and rhyme.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and the book loses what it knows. The ottava rima of “Sailing to Byzantium” is itself the artifice the soul asks to be gathered into: the poem is the golden bird it wishes to become. The sequences know their matter by breaking: the “Meditations” narrow from the ancestral house to the stare’s nest, so that a civil war is known as a narrowing of the field of vision. “Leda” breaks its eleventh line across the page at “And Agamemnon dead”, the line cut as the history is cut. “Among School Children” travels in eight stanzas from a schoolroom to the question of the dancer, never dividing its scenes, and the form is the claim. The book as ordered argues as well, sailing out of nature in its first poem and ending at midnight among the dead in its epilogue. What holds it below the top is the middle of the book: a miscellany the frame contains rather than shapes, with “A Man Young and Old” looser than the sequences before it.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Evidence first, and the evidence is nearly a century of return. Whether the golden bird is the soul’s escape from nature or only another natural thing was put to Yeats by T. Sturge Moore, and he answered with “Byzantium” (1930): the question was live to its maker and has stayed live. Whether “Leda” asks a question that can be answered, whether she put on his knowledge with his power, is read for consent, history and inspiration, and none closes it. The last line of “Among School Children” is the text from which Paul de Man drew his account of grammar and rhetoric, and whether it asserts unity or asks for a distinction that cannot be made is still argued. Whether “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” is a liberal disillusion or a turn toward authority is open. What holds it a step from the top is the share of the scholarship that is decoding, of the system, the occult names and the local history, and the slighter pieces, which give little on return.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The field is poetry in English in the 1920s, a field Yeats shared with The Waste Land (1922) and Pound’s early Cantos. The intrinsic force: the book showed that rhyme, stanza and the public voice could carry the full modern matter, civil war, a faith collapsing, sexuality in age, so that the modern was not only the fragment. That is an alternative modernism, and its reach is named: Auden’s middle style learned from the late manner this book set, and his elegy of 1939 is to its poet; the early Larkin was Yeatsian before he turned away; Roethke, and later Heaney, Mahon and the Irish poets after them, wrote in its shadow and against it. What holds the axis is where the reach lies and where the field went. Much of it is owed to Yeats’s late work at large rather than to this book, and the main course of poetry in English after 1922 ran through Eliot and Pound; this book held a field that The Waste Land moved.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Survival over ninety-eight years, in the span from seventy years to two centuries, where the usual figure is 9.0 to 9.1 and the widest presence earns 9.2. The text survives whole, revised by its author and in print without break; there is nothing in its form or fabric to charge. Presence is continuous and wide: “Sailing to Byzantium”, “Leda and the Swan” and “Among School Children” are among the most anthologised and taught poems in English, and the first has given the language a common phrase. The surface is partly fixed to its moment, the Irish wars of 1919 to 1923 and the occult system behind the poems, but the book is read for what those pressed on. What keeps it off 9.2 is the unit: the poems live everywhere, while the volume as a volume lives mainly in the academy and in collected editions, and few readers meet it in the order Yeats gave it.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged on Yeats’s English. The command is of syntax run against stanza: a single sentence carried across the eight lines of ottava rima with the rhyme falling on plain words, and the voice still that of a man speaking. “An aged man is but a paltry thing, / A tattered coat upon a stick, unless / Soul clap its hands and sing”: the enjambment holds the condition open until “unless”. The sound is placed: “Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long” is the summer’s abundance in a line. The sonnet of “Leda” opens in mid-act with a noun phrase and a colon, “A sudden blow:”, and its broken line is placed exactly. What holds it a step off the top is the unevenness: “The Three Monuments” and “Wisdom” are flat, the third part of “The Tower” loose and declamatory, and at moments the system’s vocabulary sits in the verse as jargon and the syntax of “All Souls’ Night” knots past clarity.
Score: 9.3 / 10
One law governs most of the book: soul and body, mind and history, are bound in an antinomy that only made things, a bird of gold, a poem, a tower, a dance, a child, can for a moment hold, and they hold it only while they are being made. Take the two most distant elements, the stare building in the shot-cracked wall of the tower during the civil war and the golden bird on its bough in Byzantium: both obey it, each a making set against ruin, the natural one fragile and the made one meant to last. The law covers the schoolroom and the philosophers, the bequest of pride and the son’s cradle, Leda and the dead called to a glass of muscatel. Narrowness is not the charge. The charge is that the volume gathers poems written over eight years, and the slight pieces in the middle, the senate squib of “The Three Monuments” among them, sit loosely under it, and the private system now and then imposes its terms where none are needed.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Judged on what a lyric book holds, and for a lyric book it holds much, joined by one consciousness and one house. Consciousness, in an old man’s quarrel with his mind. The body, in age, desire and sex. The family, in “Ancestral Houses”, “My Descendants” and “A Prayer for My Son”. The state, in a senator’s view of schools and of a civil war on his road. History as an agent, not a ground: the Irish wars, Troy, the turn from the Greek age to the Christian. The sacred, in the sages of Byzantium and the Christ of “Two Songs”. The natural order, in the stare, the swan and the chestnut-tree. Labour, named once and well, as a labour “where / The body is not bruised to pleasure soul”. They are integrated by one law, not listed. What holds the axis is the vantage: every order is seen from one tower by one man, and the common life and the lives of others, the soldiers, the dead and the women, are glimpsed from its window rather than held.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made and The Sublime at 9.3. A command of syntax run against stanza, a single sentence carried across the eight lines of ottava rima with the rhyme on plain words and the voice still a man’s, and the broken line of “Leda” placed exactly; and a height that comes in every register, transport, dread, violence and the plain word, in nearly every major poem. Next to them, The Bottomless Well at 9.2, nearly a century of return in which the questions of four poems have not closed.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.4, held by the vantage: every order is seen from one tower by one man, and the lives of others, the soldiers, the dead and the women, are glimpsed rather than held. Level with it, The Inevitable at 8.4, where perhaps a sixth of the book, counted by poems, is permitted rather than required, and the testament of “The Tower” runs past its point. Above them, The Swerve at 8.6, where the larger turn had been made in the books before and the forms were inherited.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.4 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.3, The Living Form at 9.0, The Inner Law at 8.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.1, The Unconcealment at 9.0, The Archetypal Deep at 9.0, Pressure on Tradition at 8.8 and The Swerve at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, the last by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below The Inevitable at 8.4, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.4. Every summit condition is met. The twelve sum to 107.0, and the work stands at 8.9; it is held below the summit by its aggregate alone.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of W. B. Yeats’s The Tower, Macmillan, London, 1928: the book as Yeats ordered it, from “Sailing to Byzantium” to “All Souls’ Night”, set as an epilogue, scored as one body, as it is read. The text in mind is the one carried into the Collected Poems (1933) and Finneran’s edition of The Poems. Every axis is judged on Yeats’s English, with no translation between. The poems weighed most, “Sailing to Byzantium”, “The Tower”, “Meditations in Time of Civil War”, “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen”, “Leda and the Swan”, “Among School Children” and “All Souls’ Night”, are known closely; “A Man Young and Old”, “Two Songs from a Play”, “Youth and Age”, “The Wheel”, “The New Faces” and “A Prayer for My Son” well; the shortest and slightest pieces only in outline, and nothing is argued from their particulars. No text was in hand and nothing was measured on a text; the line counts given, thirty-two for “Sailing to Byzantium”, sixty-four for “Among School Children” and fourteen for “Leda and the Swan”, follow from their forms. English is quoted only where its words are certain, and cited by poem where the poem is certain. Facts that could not be verified, among them the month of publication, the full order of the poems between the first and the last, the extent of Yeats’s later revisions, the dates of composition of single poems and their first printings, Yeats’s age at publication, and whether a further poem stood in the volume of 1928 and was later moved, are not given.