The Tower

Yeats bought a ruined Norman tower at Ballylee, restored it, and made it the emblem of this 1928 collection, his first major book after the Nobel Prize. Written in his sixties, the poems circle around what an aging body can still hold: desire that has not faded, a mind that keeps reaching past its own limits, and an Ireland just out of civil war. Here is “Sailing to Byzantium,” with its old man voyaging toward an art that does not decay, alongside “Leda and the Swan,” “Among School Children,” and “Meditations in Time of Civil War.” Few volumes in English have made so much out of growing old. Read the complete collection here as a free PDF and EPUB edition.