The country that the speaker is in does not suit the old. It is full of bounty, with fish in the water and birds in the trees. The young and reproductive are caught in the earthly cycle of life and death. They do not heed ageless intelligence. An old man can be mere pathos. To escape this fate and to get away from his too-vital country, the aged speaker has sailed to Byzantium. Once arrived, he calls out to the elders who are part of God’s retinue. He asks them to move in a gyre and take him away to death. He has a living heart fastened to a dead body, and as such cannot live.

Once the speaker has died, his body will no longer be organic, but fashioned of metal, like the statues that preserve dying emperor, or perhaps instead molded into a mechanical bird, which will sing to the lords and ladies of Byzantium.

Analysis

This is Yeats’ most famous poem about aging--a theme that preoccupies him throughout The Tower. The poem traces the speaker’s movement from youth to age, and the corresponding geographical move from Ireland, a country just being born as Yeats wrote, to Byzantium. Yeats felt that he no longer belonged in Ireland, as the young or the young in brutality, were caught up in what he calls “sensual music.” This is the allure of murder in the name of republicanism, which disgusted Yeats.

Byzantium was an ancient Greek city, which Yeats draws on for its decadent associations. The Byzantine Empire was centered on Constantinople, later renamed Istanbul. The speaker thinks that by escaping to Byzantium, he can escape the conflict between burning desire and a wasted body. Once there, he pleads to God’s “sages” to take away his life, meaning his body. This stanza is suggestive of Yeats’ religious beliefs, as he wrote this collection after a turn to theosophy. The idea of elders waiting upon God is not familiar from any Western religion, but would be acceptable under theosophy, which holds that all spiritualities hold some measure of truth. Yeats imagines this process as being consumed by a healing fire that will allow his body to take on any form he wishes when it is finished. His first wish, to become a statue, seems too static. His second, to become a mechanical bird, alludes to the Byzantine Emperor Theophilus. Theophilus, according to legend, had just such mechanical birds. It is thus the poet’s wish to be granted a body immune to death and to sing forever.

The speaker decries the absurdity of the contrast between his old body and his young spirit. He feels more passionate and inspired than ever - even more so than when he was a boy and went fishing in the mountains of Western Ireland. Nevertheless, he feels he must say goodbye to poetry and choose reason instead: it is more becoming to his age. He walks to and fro atop a castle and looks out over the countryside. He sees where the wealthy Mrs. French once lived. Her servant, who knew her wishes well, once cut off the ears of a rude farmer and brought them to her on a covered dish.

When the speaker was young, some men spoke of a legendary peasant girl, who was the most beautiful in the area. One drunk man talked of her often, and in the middle of a drinking session got up to seek her out. He mistook the moon for her lovely face, and drowned in a lake. The man who told the speaker these songs was blind, like Homer.

The girl may well be mistaken for the sun or moon, because, says the speaker, she has betrayed all living men. The speaker himself created Hanrahan twenty years ago. The character was destined to stumble through villages, lamed. When it was the speaker’s turn at cards, he shuffled the pack into a pack of hounds, which then turned into a hare. Hanrahan followed these creatures—

The speaker interrupts his own story, crying “enough!” He must remember a man so distraught that neither love nor music nor clipped ears could make him feel better. This man is a ruined master of the house. Before the house went to ruin, servants dressed for war came to the house. The speaker questioned them all, wondering whether they raged against age as he now does. They give no satisfactory answer. The speaker is happy to be left with Hanrahan. He calls up Hanrahan, from the knowledgeable dead, to tell him whether one thinks more often of a woman won or lost. A woman, once lost, is an irretrievable mistake.

The speaker draws up his will, leaving men who fish tirelessly his pride. His pride is not political, or tied up with slaves or tyrants, but that of Grattan and Burke. His pride is as refreshing as an unexpected shower, as poignant as a swansong. He mocks Plato and Plotinus. He is prepared to die with a combination of ancient poetry and of the love of women, both of which make man a superhuman. He leaves his faith and pride to these young fishermen. He will now prepare his body and his mind for death, or, worse, the death of those whom he has loved.

Analysis

In one of the most complicated poems of his career, Yeats tries to come to terms with his age and with the changes his country is undergoing. “The Tower” is presented in a fragmented style, a proto-modernist device that shows Yeats’ move away from romantic Irish mythology toward a sparser approach. This change was partially affected by his friendship with Ezra Pound, who encouraged Yeats to seek out alternatives to the flowery language that characterized his earlier collections.

The ideal of manhood and youth is introduced in the first stanza through the representation of the speaker: a young man. This image is pastoral, with the young man fishing in the fertile streams of Ireland. The iconic mountain of Ben Bulben tells the reader that this is western Ireland, where Yeats used to vacation during summers away from London. The speaker’s turn to Plato and reason seems forced. Put together with the narrative element of cutting off the farmer’s ears, the implication is that the speaker’s decision is unnatural and made in a top-down fashion. The poet can impose rules on himself, just as the rich can on the poor.

The lovely peasant girl, whom the speaker also refers to as Helen (as in Helen of Troy), is undoubtedly Maude Gonne. Gonne, a revolutionary who was the great love of Yeats’ life, did not return his love. She appears often in Yeats’ poetry, often symbolized by or associated with a moon: something lovely, feminine, untouchable, and capable of causing madness. The peasant who drowns in pursuit of her is proof of her power.

The speaker breaks away from the narrative of the girl to present a new character who meets a similarly grim fate. This is yet another modernist device. The speaker breaks down the illusion that the poem is or could be truthful, and displays his ability to create characters at will. Hanrahan is an intertextual character, appearing in other Yeats works. He is an Irish peasant everyman, suffering the afflictions of lameness (whether physical or moral) and alcoholism that were rampant in early 20th-century Ireland. Hanrahan shows a flash of glory, however, in the transfiguration of cards into a pack of hounds. This is an allusion to Cuchulain’s (a famous hero of Irish mythology) hounds, which were part of his army. These are quickly turned into a hare, an object of English-style hunting, so the peasant’s empowerment is all too brief.

The hare symbol transitions into a description of a great house. In Ireland, a large ruined or empty house always refers to the Protestant Ascendancy: English families that lived in Ireland and formed a ruling elite. Most of these manors were destroyed by the IRA during the Anglo-Irish War of 1919-1921. In “The Tower,” ghosts of warlike men haunt the house, and it is these ghosts, as well as other people who were old in the speaker’s childhood, that he queries about age. They do not wish to answer, so he dismisses their memory, saying he needs only Hanrahan to answer. The poem finishes with the question of Maude Gonne again. Even a reader who does not know the biographical details can read in the title of the poem that Yeats is in mourning over a lost woman. The phallic image is as lonely as can be.

I. Ancestral Houses

Surely a rich man’s life, lived in sumptuous surroundings, is an easy one. It must be easy because he is at no one’s beck and call. Dreams! The glory of the rich is merely a symbol passed down from older generations. The originator of these riches, a violent, bitter man, called in artists and architects, also bitter, so that they all could express the sweetness and gentleness that they longed for in cold stone and art. But what if their creation — gardens with peacocks, vases depicting Juno, hallways lined with portraits of ancestors — means nothing?

II. My House

An ancient bridge, an ancient tower, and a farmhouse on an acre of stony ground make up the complex where the rose may flower. The wind rustles the elms and the water hens are frightened by the cows. Up the winding stairs, one finds a writer’s desk with a much-used copy of Il Penseroso’s Platonist. The speaker recalls (or imagines) that a man and his servant stayed in this castle during ancient times of war.

III. My Table

The table holds Sato’s gift (a Japanese sword) and the pen and paper that the speaker hopes will goad him out of aimlessness. Only an aching heart forges timeless art. This art is passed through generations. Men know that none who do not love great art can go to heaven.

IV. My Descendants

The speaker inherited a healthy mind, so he must think. But man can hardly make an impression on the following generations; he is like a torn petal on grass. What if his descendants lose that petal through carelessness or through intermarriage with fools? Will the tower become a ruin? The speaker knows that love and friendship will memorialize him in the form of his tower, which he bought for friendship and refurbished for love.

V. The Road at My Door

A friendly “Falstaffian” Irregular swaggers up to the tower, joking about the war. He makes it seem as though dying is no more than playing a part in a play. A lieutenant complains about the bad weather. The speaker is almost envious of these men, but turns back to his room.

VI. The Stare’s Nest by My Window

There are bees in the cracks in the tower, and birds' nests, too. The tower is self-sufficient. A man may be killed or a house burned in the surrounding countryside, but the speaker will know nothing of it. There have been fourteen days of civil war, and “we” (the speaker includes himself) have fed the heart with dreams. The heart has grown brutal as a result of this food, and “we” now hate more strongly than we love. He invites the bees to build nests in his empty house.

VII. I see Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart’s Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness

The speaker climbs to the top of his tower and looks out over the countryside, which at the very least seems unchangeable. But he sees monstrous people covering the countryside. They shout for revenge on the murderers of Jacques Molay. They plunge to embrace nothing. The speaker nearly cries out along with them for revenge. The speaker lapses into dreams. He sees long-legged, blue-eyed women riding on unicorns. Their eyes are shut, and they think of nothing. They give way to a bold mob.

He turns away and shuts the tower door. On the stairs on the way down he wonders if he could have proven himself at something that others would understand. But even had such proof granted him friends, it would have only made him want more of the same success. He will return to reading for joy, as he did in his youth.

Analysis

Of all Yeats’ poetry, this is perhaps the most personal in its explanation of his Protestant Ascendancy past. Especially in the first section, the speaker seems ambivalent about his family history. There are elements of beauty in the ancestral house, including the classical sculpture that Yeats values so highly elsewhere in the collection, but the seclusion and grandeur of the house seem to stifle the speaker and increase his sense of otherness. A good guess at why the ancestor might have been embittered and looked to distance himself from the common folk with gardens full of peacocks is that, as a Protestant in a Catholic farmland, he was the hated overlord.

The speaker’s own house is a sharp contrast to that of his ancestor. Rather than referring to classical ideas of beauty, it is unkempt, wild. The tower itself, as well as the roses that grow in its garden, are powerful images of Celtic Ireland. The writer’s desk highlights the asceticism of the speaker in comparison to the luxury of his ancestor. The book over which the speaker “toils” is a nod to “The Tower,” in which the speaker attempts to replace his poetic instincts with reason. For this reason, the classical book does not quite fit in the tower scene. The further description of the speaker’s writing table in the third section seems to indicate that poetry will be his means of achieving immortality, but in “My Descendents” it seems he wants more. The last stanza indicates that the tower will be his monument, even if his writing and his progeny fail him.

In the last three sections, beginning with “The Road at My Door,” the speaker’s reverie and musings on his family, past and future, are interrupted by the intrusion of soldiers. The speaker identifies strongly with the soldiers, but also feels isolated from them. He views their casual attitudes towards death as astounding. He talks with them about the weather - a banal detail during times of civil war. He also sees how isolated his tower is from the actual suffering engendered in the war (the bees nesting in the tower a symbol for the danger taking long-term hold in Ireland). Despite this, he moves to the “we” form when describing the madness that is shaking his nation. The speaker manages to break away from this association when he climbs to the top of the tower to view the situation from above. Only then does he see the mob for what it is: a mass of wretches gripped by madness. The title of section seven defiantly reuses the “I.” This process of self-reflection on, identification with, and then distancing from the Republican movement echoes Yeats’ biography.

The beautiful belongings that had astonished the mob are all destroyed. There had been an ancient olive statue, ivories, ornamental bronze and stone. The mob, which the speaker calls “we,” had pretty toys in childhood, including laws that functioned and were not vulnerable to threats or violence. This way of life, however, was "unlearned" when the mob formed. Now the nightmare is everywhere, says the speaker. Drunk soldiers murder mothers without punishment. Everyone fears everyone else during the night. “We” thought we had an ideology, but we are nothing but animals fighting in a hole. Anyone who thinks clearly knows that nothing permanent, whether intellectual or physical, can be built during this period in history. No one dares to object when the ivories, the statues, and all the other beautiful things are broken. As Loie Fuller’s Chinese dancers were burnt, the new year rips in, and the men dance like barbarians.

Some poet has already compared the soul to a swan. The speaker is satisfied with that, so long as the swan knows what it looks like. A man thinking alone is lost in a labyrinth. A Platonist says that to cast off the body for thought is the luckiest death. The image of a dead swan brings a rage to end all things, and stops thought halfway. “We” learn we were crazy when we thought we would fix all things. “We” who seven years ago talked of honor and truth now shriek with the cries of the animal in the pit. The speaker invites the reader: let us mock the great, who toiled greatly and left a monument. Come let us mock the wise, the good. Mock mockers who would not lift a hand to help the good, wise or great to stop the storm, for we deal in mockery.

Violence on the road includes some attractive riders, horses with flowers, dusty wind, and thunder of mass movement. If any touch a girl, all are angry or lustful. The dust drops for insolent Robert Atisson, with whom Lady Kyteler was in love.

Analysis

The title of this poem is the year in which the Anglo-Irish War began. Yeats had agonizingly mixed feelings about the independence movement in Ireland. He was in love with Maude Gonne, a revolutionary, and had been steeped in the Irish mythology that the IRA used as propaganda to get young men to fight (they often spoke of the heroism of Cuchulain, for example). However, Yeats was from an Anglo-Irish family, and was born a member of the Protestant Ascendancy - the very group that saw to lose from Irish independence. Yeats’ identification with this group was always ambiguous, but this poem does express horror at the destruction of their belongings.

Yeats had a strong affinity for art and history, so it is with horror that the speaker describes the destruction of art in Ireland’s large (Protestant) manors. This poem is more regular in form than many of Yeats’ looser lyrical poems, even rhyming alternate lines toward the end. This represents the longing for order that juxtaposes the subject matter of the poem. This is a highly unflattering portrait of the IRA, who were very popular among the Irish during the Anglo-Irish war. Yeats describes them as full of bloodlust, rather than as being guided by a strong ideological purpose. Toward the end of the poem, we see that the destruction is not only of the artwork in the great houses, but of thought itself. The speaker self-identifies as a trafficker in mockery, indicating that even thinkers have lost their way. The last stanza returns to visceral imagery, and the speaker indicates the seductive nature of the violence that is sweeping Ireland. The horses and men are powerful, beautiful, and strong, and announce their sexuality without fear. But in their wake are ancient witches and demons, indicating that the brute feelings that have been called up in support of the Anglo-Irish War are more ancient and more sinister.

I. The Wheel

The speakers, identified as “we,” call in winter for spring, in spring for summer, and in summer for winter. In winter “we” call for nothing, because the spring will not come again. “We” only long for the grave.

II. Youth and Age

When the speaker was young he cried out against injustice, but he now praises the world as he leaves it.

III. The New Faces

If the speaker's friend or lover were the first dead, I would not walk where we swore we would never die. The shadows of the speaker and the dead would be so vital, they would make the living seem dead in comparison.

Analysis

The inclusion of these short poem fragments in an otherwise finished collection is another indication of Yeats’ move away from formal structure. These fragments serve to further emphasize his agitation over aging: the issue seems even to dominate his scribblings, his notes. “The Wheel” is a poignant call against death. It seems that death is not part of the natural order, but rather a halt to the progression of seasons. “Youth and Age” illustrates another unnatural aspect of the approach of death: it makes the critical poet falsely praise life as it leaves him. In the last fragment, Yeats tries to deny death by asserting that even in death he would be more inspired, more lively than the living.

The speaker calls on a ghost to stand over his son, Michael, so that he may sleep well, and so that his mother may sleep well, too. The ghost should hold a sword, as some have planned the infant’s murder to prevent his future haughty actions.

Although God can make everything anew and teach stars to sing, the speaker says that He has not expressed Himself verbally, nor wailed in pain. And when the devil’s friends take over the town, a women and a man will still be able to protect their child.

Analysis

This poem also shows Yeats’ affinity for theosophy. In the 1920s, Yeats attended séances in an attempt to speak to dead loved ones. In the same way that other poems state the belief that a spirit may be called up and spoken to, in this poem Yeats converses with God in a more traditional, one-on-one fashion.

The poem’s message is a simple one, matched by its simple ABABCDDC rhyme scheme, which may remind one of the simpler ABABCDCD rhyme scheme of many lullabies. The danger that Yeats fears for his child is real, though, as civil war tore his country. Knowledge of his own status in the Irish elite is evident in the word “haughty.” His infant son’s life is threatened by his possible later “haughty” deeds because he is a member of the Protestant Ascendancy: a group targeted by the IRA.

I saw a stricken virgin tear dead Dionysus’s heart from him and take it away, and the muses sang that it was a great year, as if it were a play.

Another Troy must rise and fall, Argo’s bow must sail again, and the stories of the Roman Empire must occur again. Everything that man enjoys will cease—love itself ends its glory, as does the glory of battle.

Analysis

Yeats was a playwright himself, and helped to found Ireland’s National Theatre in 1904. But he was always bothered by the non-immediacy of language in plays. Events were reenacted, but the audience could not be made to really feel them as they might in real time, or even in poetry.

Yeats begins this poem with the death of Dionysus, the god of revelry. The muses singing as if in a play is an insult to the event: it takes away its immediacy. Only the virgin properly feels the enormity of what has occurred. The speaker continues that the events of the Trojan War (Argo was one of the boats used to attack Troy) must replay over and over. But each time after the fact they are staged, and thus lose something of the original.

In the last stanza, Yeats moves away from Classical imagery, and generalizes about the human condition. Desire withers the very thing it desires, climax is the beginning of the end, and when great events are redone—as in a play—they intrinsically lose some of their luster.

Locke fainted while the Garden died, and God took the spinning-jenny out of his side. The speaker got this truth from a medium’s mouth, dark like the crowns of Nineveh.

Analysis

The very title of this poem is a play on its contents, which are fragmental. The first stanza is humorous. Locke is, of course, John Locke, who was an Enlightenment thinker who advocated for reason. The idea of him swooning is therefore comical. The Garden is the Garden of Eden, the implication being that with the flowering of reason comes the withering of the Bible and traditional faith. God taking a spinning-jenny out of his side reenacts the act of Adam taking out his rib to fashion Eve, but rather than a new type of person, an industry is created.

The second stanza is slightly darker, suggesting that greater truth is not available through reason or the Bible. The supreme authority on both is a medium, or a reader of spirits’ thoughts. These are as powerful and ancient as the Assyrian crowns Yeats compares them with.

A sudden hit from above, and the swan’s wings beat above the girl. His webbed feet caress her thighs, and he catches her in the nape of his neck. Her fingers cannot push his feather from her thighs. A shudder in his loins impregnates her and foreshadows the burning wall and Agamemnon’s death. The speaker asks her whether she accessed his knowledge as well as his power before he let her drop.

Analysis

This is the most famous poem in the collection, and its most intense and immediate in terms of imagery. The myth of Leda and the Swan is a familiar one from Classical mythology. Zeus fell in love with a mortal, Leda the Trojan queen, and raped her while taking on the form of a swan to protect his identity. She became pregnant with Helen of Troy. That Helen was part goddess helps to explain how her beauty brought about the destruction of two civilizations. Despite its ABAB rhyme scheme, the poem maintains a breathlessness that is partially due to enjambment, a poetic technique that Yeats uses liberally in this collection.

The impregnation in this poem has many layers. There is the physical impregnation of the girl with a daughter, but also the sense that her womb holds the blueprint for the entire Trojan War. Therefore even the rape takes on a sort of inevitability, similar to the events that the still unborn Helen will cause.

Hooves stamp against the black wood, which is filled with green parrots. The speaker knows this horseplay to be murderous. The sun has ripened healthy food, but the speaker, driven insane by the green birds, harvests foul wheat and grinds it in the dark. He bakes it slowly and brings out wine from a barrel where seven Ephesian topers sleep in ignorance of Alexander’s empire. He orders his loved one to stretch out and sleep a Saturnalian sleep. His soul will always be better than his words in expressing his love, but there is none so fit as him, he says, to keep these horrible green birds away.

Analysis

In this poem, the speaker seems almost childish in his ability to climb inside an illustration that he is looking at and imagine from there. Edmund Dulac was a famous French illustrator who was working during the same time period as Yeats (this is one of the few contemporary allusions in this collection). The poet is also childlike in his insistence that language is inadequate. He will prove his mettle as a lover by watching over the sleep of his loved one - not by telling her how much he loves her.

The speaker paces around a classroom, looking at the schoolchildren. The nun says that what they learn in school is to read and to sing. They learn about history, sewing, and how to be neat “in a modern way.” The children stare at the speaker, an old politician.

He dreams of a Leda-like body bent over a fire in a domestic scene. She is telling a story of how a small interaction with a child turned its day to tragedy. Together, over the story, they share a great deal. Looking at the children, he wonders what she was like at their age. He sees her as a child and is mad with love.

Her current, gaunt image comes to mind. She once was pretty, but she is now comfortable and old. Did the speaker’s mother, when carrying him, know that seeing this woman would be enough compensation for her child’s birth? Plato thought nature to be imperfect; Aristotle contemplated the nature of things, as did Pythagoras...but these are all merely subjects for students to study.

Nuns and mothers adore images, but the mothers’ images are their children. The speaker questions life’s very location, wondering what part of a tree is the essence of the tree, what part of a dancer is a dancer, and which is the dance itself.

Analysis

The subject matter of schoolchildren contrasts greatly with that of the earlier historical poems in this collection. Here is evidence of civil society, of progress, and of modernity - none of which were possible during the Anglo-Irish War or the Civil War. From this, and from the implication that the speaker is a senator (as Yeats was after 1924), one may deduce that this is a later poem, written from the standpoint of a more peaceful Ireland.

The children are poignant for the speaker because they are associated both with an obvious type of innocence and with the woman whom the speaker loves. By comparing her child self and her current incarnation, it is sharply evident to the speaker how she has aged. The imagined conversation between the two, in which she seems to be a schoolteacher rather than a revolutionary, is wishful thinking on his part. Yeats’ musings on whether it was destined that he should fall in love with this woman is related to “Leda and the Swan” in that it presupposes a series of events that must come to pass. The final stanza is a philosophical riddle concerning whether man acts or is acted upon, and serves as a connection to Yeats' uncertainty as to whether he loves or was destined to love.

The Chorus invites praise to the horses, architecture, nightingales, and the immortal ladies of Colonus. In a nearby gymnasts’ garden grow olive trees. These gnarled, wild trees reflect the shape of the Athenian intellect, and are protected by Athena.

Travelers to this country see the crocus and narcissus bloom where the Great Mother plucks a flower and mourns for her daughter. The country is pious and remembers that when mankind was confined to land, it was Poseidon who gave them bit and oar so that they might sail. All Athenian children talk about the oar and bit, and talk day and night of the sea.

Analysis

This is an original adaptation from Oedipus at Colonus, one in Sophocles’ series of tragedies based around Oedipus, and first performed around 400 BC. The more familiar first play of the cycle, Oedipus Rex, features a man who unwittingly kills his father and marries his mother. The second play, Oedipus at Colonus, follows Oedipus on his journey to Athens (Colonus), where he is fated to die. After strongly arguing that he is not responsible for the atrocities he was destined to commit, Oedipus does indeed die — an offstage event that is reported by the chorus. The chorus, which narrates many of Yeats’ poems, was a traditional feature of Classical poetry, and served as a narrator for the audience.

This poem presents a quite different view of death, in that it describes the place where Oedipus knows he must die as a promised land. There are some hints of sadness in the poem. The narcissus, for example, is the symbolic flower of death. Although Oedipus figures in the title, there is no mention of him in the poem: he is not included in the bounty that Athens has to offer. Indeed, later in the play the Athenians try to drive him out of their city, fearing that he will curse it with his bad deeds.

The "true faith" was found when stained glass, statues and other artwork told the story. It had been told wrong by peasant preachers. The new teller swept the carpenter's dust off the floor.

Miracle (Christ) began to have playtime with a mother who was sitting for elaborate portraits and chryselephantine statues. She sewed him fancy trousers while sitting for these portraits. Noah's flood never reached the towers in Babylon in which they sat. There, he lived a wild infancy.

Analysis

Even the title of this poem is ironic. The very term "true faith," in the context of a collection that is partly set during times of civil war, seems silly, even dangerous. The irony becomes manifest in that while replacing the more rustic forms of Christianity, the church officials sweep out the dust, thereby separating themselves from the truth about the religion.

The second section of this poem (the turning point is at the line beginning "miracle") reasons backward in time to see what religion would have looked like. The result is an incongruous picture of a stiff mother Mary who is posing for portraits rather than living the life of a real person. The irony is that this version of "wisdom" abandons the basic humanity in what claims to be a humane religion.

When everything that has run cradle to the grave runs from the grave to the cradle, this will mirror the thoughts of the fool. When all this is past and the speaker is a ghost, he will still be material. He will be a grouping of material, so thin as to be transparent. He may then find a faithful love.

Analysis

This is yet another poem about aging. The AABCCB rhyme scheme conveys a moderate degree of childishness, but the six lines per stanza (rather than eight) make it slightly irregular, recalling the speaker's identification with the fool who thinks that life can be spooled backwards as well as forwards. The speaker's lack of balance also calls into question the idea that he might actually find true love, thereby contradicting the sentiment found in many of the other poems in the work.

The speaker's Heart was broken by love that it had not sought out in England. The south wind brought longing, the east wind despair, the west wind pathos, and the north wind fear. His Heart feared the hurt that the girl might bring, and thus went mad.

The Heart laughs and asks the speaker why he called him mad to run away from so young a girl. How could she have mated with someone so wild and old, it wonders. The speaker answers that he found her also wild, and tells the Heart that it fabricates lies. The Heart tells the speaker to say whatever he likes, now that the girl can no longer hear him. Now she will no longer mistake childish gratitude for love; now she will choose a young man for his wildness.

Analysis

The capitalization of the word "Heart" is the speaker's own. In dialogue with his heart, he attempts to isolate it, to hold it apart from himself to save himself from despair. The dialogue between the speaker and his heart is Classical in character (many philosophical debates were framed in this way), but it is unclear who is the teacher and who is the student.

I. First Love

Although, like the moon, she was murderously beautiful, in the beginning she seemed like a real human being. She crossed the speaker’s path and he thought she was flesh and blood until he touched her and found stone. Since he did so, he cannot do a thing, because one must be lunatic to touch the moon. When she smiled, it changed him such that he had no more thoughts than the stars when the moon comes out.

II. Human Dignity

The speaker is in such pain at his unrequited love that he longs to call out. He lies under a tree on a bit of stone, but his dignity prevents him from crying out.

III. The Mermaid

The mermaid drags a swimming boy down to be her lover, forgetting, in her happiness, that he will drown.

IV. The Death of the Hare

He passes out the hunt of the hare, and she becomes distracted. He is distraught, and observes the death of the hare.

V. The Empty Cup

When one is crazed with thirst and finds a cup, one is almost afraid to drink, to die of happiness. The speaker finds a cup that is dry and becomes crazy, unable to sleep.

VI. His Memories

The old should be hidden from the rest, so that they will not see aged bodies. Women care now as much for the speaker as they do for the braying of a donkey. Helen once lay in his now wasted arms.

VII. The Friends of his Youth

The speaker’s voice is jagged from laughter, not time, and when the moon is full he laughs. She comes down the lane with a stone wrapped up as if it were a child. She thinks it is a child, and shrieks to it. Peter, who was an important man, thinks he is a peacock and cries. The speaker laughs because one cry is love, and the other pride.

VIII. Summer and Spring

Lovers sat up all night and knew they now shared a soul and fell into one others’ arms to make it whole. Then Peter looked murderous in jealousy, because he had talked with her under that very tree. There was a fight.

IX. The Secrets of the Old

The speaker has old secrets. The moon tells her what she dared not think when the thoughts were too powerful, enough to drown an old lover.

X. His Wildness

The love of Peg, Meg, and Paris are all gone, so he must sail away. If I were alone I would cry like a peacock or sing a stone a lullaby, for that is natural for one who lives only in memory.

XI. From ‘Oedipus at Colonus’

Endure your life and ask for no longer. Aged men should not remember the delights of youth. That memory can divide families, cause death or despair, as wandering beggars know.

The bride is carried through the celebrating street to the groom’s room. I celebrate death. Ancient writers say that never to have lived is best. I say “the second best’s a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.”

Analysis

This elongated poem is enacts the loss of vitality that is its theme (and the theme of many other poems in this collection). The young man begins with wild hope, the form of the poem in a childlike AABACA rhyme scheme (some of the rhymes being loose). Instead of the symmetry of four stanzas, there are but three. This, along with the indication that the love is not quite human, is ominous. "Human Dignity" makes her rejection explicit, and the rhyming verse now seems forced, out of joint with the speaker's feelings. We see that love, even when returned, is no easy task, as the mermaid drowns her lover. After a moment away from the specifics of the speaker's own lover, we return to her in "the death of the hare."

Aging occurs during "The Empty Cup." We know that time has passed because the speaker has repeatedly been denied by his lover (hence the thirst and the empty cup). By "His Memories," the speaker feels inhuman enough to suggest hiding himself from humanity. The speaker takes an unforgiving approach to age, suggesting that the elderly should be locked up.

In the last six sections, the speaker explores the ambivalence of old age. One disadvantage is watching one's friends go mad, but the speaker is still able to laugh (albeit not maliciously) at their expense. Even youthful episodes are made to feel repeated and stale, as we find out that a child's new lover has merely replaced the old, and is going through the same motions under the same tree. The glimmer of hope in this poem is in "The Secrets of the Old," in which no positive secrets are presented, only negative ones. Revelations no longer cause suicide or the sort of intense pain described in "Human Dignity." The best that old age has to offer is a sort of nostalgia and a lessening of the type of pain described earlier in the poem.

Crowds assemble for meetings under our most renowned patriots: one on a high pedestal, the surrounding two lower down. Politicians say that purity built Ireland, and tell audiences to cling to it. The “three old rascals” laugh.

Analysis

This poem provides a bit of topical humor in an otherwise quite serious collection. The three monuments about which Yeats writes were on O’Connell Street (called Sackville Street before independence), the main thoroughfare in Dublin. The three monuments are of Daniel O’Connell, Charles Stewart Parnell, and Admiral Nelson (the latter of which is placed on a pedestal, higher than the other two). The irony is that none were lily-white men who should be held up as examples. Parnell notoriously had an affair with a married woman, O’Connell was a known demagogue, and Nelson was an imperialist. Nelson’s Pillar, as it was known, was blown to pieces on Easter 1966 by the IRA, presumably to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising.

At midnight on All Souls' Night, the bells of Christ Church and other churches in Dublin ring through a room. Two glasses of wine bubble, and the speaker calls upon a ghost to drink the wine vapor. He chants:

I have a marvelous thing to say that only the living and the sober mock.

I call up Horton, an old friend. When his lady died, he could find no palliative, so he only wished for death. Meeting God and meeting her were mixed up in his mind, but whichever dominated for him lit up the sky.

I remember Florence Emery, who traveled to teach among dark-skinned people, so none would see her as she aged.

I call up MacGregor Mathers, who was a lunatic and with whom I had a falling out...but friends are forever. He was full of energy, before loneliness drove him crazy.

But it does not matter which ghost it may be, it only matters that he is insubstantial enough to drink wine vapor.

Although it seems crazy, and may make sober people cry and laugh for a whole hour, I need only this thought.

Analysis

Yeats ends the collection on a quite personal note, with an expression of his own beliefs about the city of Dublin. Christ Church, mentioned in the first stanza, is the largest and best-known church in Dublin. The speaker celebrates alone, but finally finds a place for the dead in his universe - thereby solving, to some extent, the problem of whether there is life after death.

This poem is the Epilogue to a separate work, A Vision, a mystical piece that Yeats based on the cycles of the moon. “All Souls’ Night” shares this work's haunted sense that the speaker knows something that the audience does not. He might be willing to share, but it is as if he is on another plane. His knowledge and insights sound mad to a “sober” person.

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