The Tower (poem)

"The Tower" is a poem by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats. It is the second poem in The Tower, a 1928 collection of Yeats' poems.

The poem features Yeats wrestling with his old age. He contemplates the foolish actions of his neighbors and wonders how they responded to their own aging, then celebrates the Anglo-Irish people and offers them his "faith and pride" as an inheritance.

Excerpt
What shall I do with this absurdity — O heart, O troubled heart — this caricature, Decrepit age that has been tied to me As to a dog's tail? 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 And had the livelong summer day to spend. It seems that I must bid the Muse go pack, Choose Plato and Plotinus for a friend Until imagination, ear and eye, Can be content with argument and deal In abstract things; or be derided by A sort of battered kettle at the heel.