A review by steveatwaywords
The Tower: A Facsimile Edition by W.B. Yeats

challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad slow-paced

4.5

Set aside for a bit Yeats's personal challenges with aging, with finding love, with grasping the intangible. These themes pervade most of the works included here, none simply rendered or thoughtless doggerel. Instead, I am always stunned by a subtext which lives beneath most all of Yeats's work and stands openly before us in the title poem: the life magical and mythic. 

Nothing as flippantly callous as a "Christian faith" or "eternity" is offered: instead Yeats works upon the individual (or at least the poet) as furrowing a narrative soil ambiguous in symbol and portent, nonetheless ever-past and forward. From and within it lie the meaning we seek. It metabolizes into the outward and more visible forms of love and flesh. 

Old lecher with a love on every wind,
Bring up out of that deep considering mind
All that you have discovered in the grave,
For it is certain that you have
Reckoned up every unforeknown, unseeing
Plunge, lured by a softening eye,
Or by a touch or a sigh,
Into the labyrinth of another's being;
 
Does the imagination dwell the most
Upon a woman won or a woman lost?


We may (and do) look to the autobiography and literariness in his lines; we marvel at tone simultaneously suffering and resolute, mourning and celebratory. But none of these descriptions alone satisfy what these poems are up to.  


And I declare my faith:
I mock Plotinus' thought
And cry in Plato's teeth,
Death and life were not
Till man made up the whole,
Made lock, stock and barrel
Out of his bitter soul,
Aye, sun and moon and star, all,
And further add to that
That, being dead, we rise,
Dream and so create
Translunar Paradise.


Miracle lives and lies in the imaginative act, if only we'd reach.