The Tower - Analysis

The insult of the dog's tail body

Yeats begins with a blunt, almost comic disgust at aging: this absurdity, this caricature, Decrepit age tied to him As to a dog's tail. The central conflict of The Tower is set right there: the mind is still electric, but the body has become a humiliating attachment, a thing that drags. The speaker insists he has Never had I more Excited, passionate, fantastical imagination than now—precisely when the body is least able to serve it. That contradiction creates the poem’s tone: impatient, scornful, and also oddly energized, as if anger is one of the last reliable fuels.

He flirts with a drastic solution: bid the Muse go pack and choose Plato and Plotinus, trading images for argument and abstract things. But even in the proposal you can feel how much he hates it. The alternative is worse: to be derided by a battered kettle at the heel, a petty, clanking body that makes a mockery of spiritual ambition. The poem’s question is not simply how to grow old; it is how to keep making work when your own flesh has become an heckler.

Battlements as a memory-machine

Part II shifts the scene to the tower’s height: I pace upon the battlements and stare. The tower becomes a place where the mind tries to command what time has scattered. He looks down at foundations, at a tree like a sooty finger, and sends imagination outward under the day's declining beam. That declining light matters: it’s late-day light, late-life light, and his act is a kind of last survey—calling Images and memories from ruin and ancient trees because he wants to ask a question of them.

What arrives is not a tranquil pastoral history but a set of charged anecdotes: Mrs. French’s refined household, and then sudden violence—an insolent farmer's ears clipped and served in a little covered dish. The tower’s view pulls up a world where status and cruelty share a table, where memory is not a museum but a provocation. Even the “song” about the peasant girl turns into a force that rearranges reality: her praised face makes Farmers jostled at the fair, as if art can alter social gravity.

When song makes men mad

The poem then sharpens its claim about art’s power by showing it as dangerous. Men maddened by those rhymes try to verify the sung beauty with their eyes, but mistook the brightness of the moon for day, and one is drowned in the great bog. It’s not just that poetry idealizes; it intoxicates perception, making the world misreadable. The speaker’s response is startlingly ambitious: O may the moon and sunlight seem / One inextricable beam, because if I triumph I must make men mad. Triumph, for him, is not calm influence; it’s the power to fuse categories (moon and sun, dream and fact) until ordinary judgment can’t keep up.

There’s a hard tension here. The speaker complains of being mocked by age, yet he also courts a different kind of mockery: the artist as a public disturber, someone whose success is measured by how thoroughly he unbalances others. The bog-drowning is both cautionary tale and advertisement for potency.

Go therefore; but leave Hanrahan: refusing the clean escape

When Yeats summons his own creations—I myself created Hanrahan—the tower becomes a courtroom where the poet interrogates his past imagination. Hanrahan stumbles through horrible splendour of desire, and the poem admits a weary self-consciousness: I thought it all out twenty years ago. Yet the speaker won’t discard that old, unruly material. At the end of the long roll-call—Mrs. French, the drowned man, the cross-gartered men-at-arms—he finds an answer in those eyes / That are impatient to be gone. Whatever those eyes belong to (youth, the dead, the past itself), the command is clear: Go therefore. And then the hinge: but leave Hanrahan, because I need all his mighty memories.

This is the poem’s decisive turn away from the “Plato and Plotinus” fantasy. He will not become a serene thinker in exchange for escaping humiliation. He chooses instead to keep the messy, erotic, half-mad storehouse—Hanrahan’s deep considering mind—because it contains the only knowledge that matters to him now: the knowledge of desire, error, pride, and the ways people plunge into the labyrinth of another's being.

A question that bites: won or lost?

Yeats presses Hanrahan (and himself) with a cruelly specific question: Does the imagination dwell the most / Upon a woman won or woman lost? It’s not a general meditation on love; it’s a test of where the mind truly returns when it’s alone. If the imagination chooses the lost, Yeats demands an admission that the turning aside came from pride, Cowardice, or some old name like conscience. In that case, memory doesn’t merely sadden; it eclipses: the sun's / Under eclipse, the day blotted out. The poem suggests that one of old age’s tortures is not just physical decline, but the way time forces motives into clarity, stripping away the flattering story.

The will: a pride that won’t join a party

Part III opens with a new kind of voice—public, declarative: It is time that I wrote my will. What he bequeaths is not money or property but pride, and he gives it to upstanding men who still climb streams at dawn and drop their cast—figures of hardiness and early light. Yet the pride he names is politically edged: people Bound neither to Cause nor to State, neither to slaves nor tyrants, aligned with Burke and ... Grattan—a heritage of independence that refuses both submission and domination. Even here, the tower’s stance matters: it is elevated, solitary, not easily conscripted.

The images of pride are sudden and physical: headlong light, the fabulous horn, the sudden shower / When all streams are dry. These are not polite virtues; they are jolts of abundance. And the culminating emblem is the swan that must sing his last song on a fading gleam—a figure for late-life art that is beautiful precisely because it is last, because it insists on song at the edge of vanishing.

Mocking Plato: making sun and moon from the soul

Then comes the poem’s philosophical declaration, and it lands like a shove: I mock plotinus' thought and cry in plato's teeth. The speaker rejects the idea that reality is a higher order we contemplate; instead, Death and life were not until man made up the whole out of his bitter soul—sun and moon and star included. This is a fierce defense of imagination as world-making, not world-decorating. It also clarifies why he could not, in Part I, sincerely become a dealer in abstractions: for Yeats, abstractions are not purer than images; they are weaker than the soul’s actual creative violence.

Even the afterlife is framed as making: once dead, we rise, Dream and so create / Translunar paradise. The poem’s refusal of passivity is complete. Whether living or dead, the human task is to project, shape, invent—an insistence that answers the original problem of decrepitude by relocating value away from the body’s performance and into the mind’s fierce capacity to form.

Daws in the loophole: building with scraps

The short daws passage is easy to miss, but it quietly restates the whole poem in miniature. At the tower’s loophole—a defensive aperture—birds drop twigs layer upon layer until a nest is formed and warmed. It’s an image of making under constraint: no grand materials, just scraps, repeated acts, persistence. In a poem about aging, it’s also a kind of consolation without sentimentality: creation continues, not because conditions improve, but because something living keeps stacking twigs.

Making peace with ruin without surrendering

The ending returns to the body’s decline—wreck of body, Slow decay of blood, dull decrepitude—and adds the deeper griefs: death of friends and the loss of every brilliant eye that once made life catch in the breath. Yet the poem’s final aim is not denial; it is scale. He wants these coming disasters to seem like clouds of the sky / When the horizon fades, or like a bird's sleepy cry as light deepens. The tone softens, but it doesn’t collapse. After all the defiance—after insisting on madness, pride, and world-making—the last movement is a hard-earned steadiness: not transcendence by abstraction, but a practiced capacity to hold loss inside a larger, dimming landscape without letting it cancel the impulse to sing.