2/6/08

The Tower differs greatly from the other selections we have read of Yeats thus far. Instead of battling out the opposition of ideas in his own mind and uncertainty of his own beliefs he seems to express what he knows to be true. He now speaks with the voice of authority; the voice of a man who is under the impression that he has reached some sort of understanding of the meaning of it all, a man who believes in The Vision. Therefore, instead of using the poem to create a tension between the abstract, dream world and the tangible world, for example, he seems to be working with a multitude of symbols, probably derived from The Vision, and attempts to impart on us his wealth of new found wisdom. Sailing to Byzantium seems to be a call to recognize the eternal.
Yeats’ obsession with mortality, however, has not faded in this selection. He seems to have accepted mortality by believing that mortality only exists for the body and not for the soul. Again, in The Tower, Yeats speaks of the decay of the body and expresses the contrast of body and mind, like in The Wild Swans at Coole, but here he expresses a certainty that ,although the body decays, the soul lives on and leaves a legacy, leaves an imprint on what Carl Jung would call the universal unconsciousness, and even more then that, the soul lives on, seeing all: past, present, future, and can still communicate with the living world. (Once out of nature I shall never take / My bodily form from any natural thing, / But such a form as Brecian goldsmiths make / Of hammered gold and gold enameling/ To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;)
He seems to be slightly consumed with the idea that he can leave a glorious imprint on the universal unconsciousness, by creating or expressing great archetypes, just as Homer did.