THE TOWER

The Tower is a volume which is steeped in ambivalence towards Ireland, more precisely towards what Ireland was making of itself. Writing to Olivia Shakespear, having had time to ponder the completed volume, Yeats expressed his astonishment at its ‘bitterness’ and his happy anticipation of a voyage to Italy: the phrase he uses is reminiscent of one that occurs in ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, the first poem in the book: ‘Once out of Irish bitterness I can find some measure of sweetness and light’ (L 373). He is bitter and Ireland is bitter. The very emblem of the Tower is suggestive of an ambivalence, one component of which is a bitterness in part derived from the assertive posture of the Ascendancy mage.

One thing to bear in mind is the meaning of Yeats's gesture in buying and then naming the tower then known as Ballylee Castle. People who do not know Ireland especially well do not always realize just how common there a tower castle such as this is. These keeps, originally built by the Normans, were subsequently occupied for the most part by their Norman– Gaelic descendants, who formed an important part of the Gaelic order in the Middle Ages. From the seventeenth century, and even earlier, such castles gradually came into the hands of the Protestant property-owning classes. In occupying a castle, then, and one that is not far from Lady Gregory's Coole Park, Yeats is expressing an affinity both with the Ascendancy and with the Gaelic and Norman–Gaelic aristocracy which it had displaced. A symbolic compromise between these two groups might seem unlikely, but it was increasingly to become a prime example of Yeats's attempts to forge unity out of division. Renaming Ballylee Castle ‘Thoor Ballylee’ could be seen as an act of Adamic naming, as some critics have recognized. Better, perhaps, to see it in the light of the quasi-Adamic naming of the Romantic poet. It is, at any rate, a gesture at putting down roots, at possession of the demesne, and one that attempts to look originary in going back to a Gaelic name. In fact, though, in Elizabethan times Ballylee Castle was known as ‘Islandmore Castle’, which points to the original Gaelic name being ‘Caisleán Oileáin Mhóir’ (‘Castle of the Great Island’).