Yeats's Tower

In 1917 WB Yeats bought for 35 pounds an old castle with attached cottage on the banks of the river Cloon near Coole Park, County Galway, home to his dear friend Lady Gregory, and set about restoring it for his new bride Georgina Hyde-Lees, known as 'George'. He named his home 'Thoor Ballylee' ('Thoor' is Irish for 'Tower'); it became an idyllic summer retreat for Yeats and his family for twelve years. Here are some extracts from various letters he wrote enthusing about this new and inspiring environment:

... everything is so beautiful here that to go elsewhere is to leave beauty behind.

We are in our Tower and I am writing poetry as I always do here, and, as always happens, no matter how I begin, it becomes love poetry before I am finished with it.

... as you see I have no news, for nothing happens in this blessed place but a stray beggar or a heron.

It was here that Yeats wrote many of the rich and mature poems of his later years — including the 1928  volume he called, simply, The Tower. In Meditations In Time Of Civil War, one of the poems from this collection, he describes his home with these lines:

An ancient bridge, and a more ancient tower,

A farmhouse that is sheltered by its wall,

An acre of stony ground,

Where the symbolic rose can break in flower,

Old ragged elms, old thorns innumerable,

The sound of the rain or sound

Of every wind that blows;

The stilted water-hen

Crossing stream again

Scared by the splashing of a dozen cows;

A winding stair, a chamber arched with stone,

A grey stone fireplace with an open hearth,

A candle and written page.

The Tower contains twenty-one poems (I have my own Penguin paperback copy on the desk beside me as I write) including the well-known Sailing To Byzantium, A Prayer For My Son and Leda And The Swan. I'm particularly fond of the sequence A Man Young And Old, which begins like this:

First Love

Though nurtured like the sailing moon

In beauty's murderous brood,

She walked awhile and blushed awhile

And on my pathway stood

Until I thought her body bore

A heart of flesh and blood.

But since I laid a hand thereon

And found a heart of stone

I have attempted many things

And not a thing is done,

For every hand is lunatic

That travels on the moon.

She smiled and that transfigured me

And left me but a lout,

Maundering here, and maundering there,

Emptier of thought

Than the heavenly circuit of its stars

When the moon sails out.

After the Yeats family moved out in 1929, Ballylee fell into disuse once more; but it was restored again in 1965 as a Yeats museum. The adjoining cottage became a shop and tea room.

Below is the slate slab Yeats had carved when he carried out the initial restoration: 

    

I, the poet William Yeats,

With old mill boards and sea-green slates,

And smithy work from the Gort forge,

Restored this tower for my wife George;

And may these characters remain

When all is ruin once again.

(All images from Wikimedia Commons)