What I find most intriguing about Yeats’s poems from The Tower are his references to mythology and empire. These nods to the past, though at times appear disjointed in certain poems are also appropriate in light his transformation as a poet. Ellmann asserts Yeats’s later years as a poet is a result of his complex and mystical belief in the different phases of the human soul and his desire to reconcile the four main antinomies that form the world. Yeats believed that time in which he was living was nearing its peak of objectivity, which would then cycle into subjectivity. These ideas also play into Yeats’s obsession with aging and the afterlife.
Meditation on enduring images from the past reveals a certain preoccupation with the immortal – things that have not deteriorated over time. Yeats mentions both preservation and deterioration (“loosening masonry”, “cracked masonry”.) But unlike his earlier poems, which view aging with a certain fear, this fear seems to be quelled by the hope of his words enduring after his death, like those of Chaucer and Homer. However at the same time his own doubt surfaces through imagery of the inadequacy of stone and more explicitly when he says, “my works are all stamped down into the sultry mud.”
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