In one of its earliest forms, the tower is closely connected with astronomy and theology because of its proximity to the sky and thus to the divine and divine knowledge, as height is also associated with spirituality. The Tower of Babel is perhaps one of the most long-standing and well-known tower symbols that represent men’s desire to approach divine wisdom. Also, because of its enclosed nature, the tower has also been associated with philosophical retreat, its source reaching back to early Christian iconography (Murawska 143). In eighteen and nineteenth century art and literature, the tower is popularly regarded as a symbol of thoughtful isolation or forced imprisonment, the latter of which most commonly seen in
nineteen-century Gothic novels, where a high and isolated tower often implies imprisonment.
As to the association of thoughtful isolation, Katarzyna Murawska identifies Milton’s Il Penseroso as the first prominent literary image of the tower “built for solitary meditation, and occupied by a philosopher in search of ultimate knowledge” (146). The lines from Il Penseroso are:
Or let my lamp, at midnight hour, Be seen in some high lonely tower, Where I may oft outwatch the Bear, With thrice great Hermes, or unsphere The spirit of Plato to unfold
What worlds or what vast regions hold The immortal mind that hath forsook Her mansion in this fleshly nook
The laborious search for ultimate knowledge is signified by the lamp that shines at midnight hour, in a “high lonely tower” secluded and isolated from the common world, the lamp being the sign of a vigilant mind. The figure of Penseroso makes clear his relationship to “the Platonic tradition as well as to Neoplatonism: the idea of the soul liberated from matter and raised to a higher level of cognition” (Murawska 148). This image was later portrayed in one of Samuel Palmer’s Milton cycle, “The Lonely Tower,” which shows a silhouetted tower against a midnight landscape, with a lamp-lit top, detached from the world below. Palmer’s illustration also highlights the distance between the tower, situated on the mountaintop and belonging to the part of the sky, and the common world, represented by the shepherds and farmers at the lower part of the painting, who look upwards to the tower and its seemingly unreachable distant light. By the turn of the nineteenth century, the secluded nature of the tower was a popular association. When Shelley makes the tower symbol a repeated motif in his works, he not only continued the literary image created by Milton—philosopher in a
lonely tower searching for wisdom—but also added an escapist element to it, often stressing self-willed exile and rejection of the world. Murawska also points out that Shelley, in inheriting the lamp motif from Milton, “furnishes his tower with a different, less ambiguous symbol of the tower-dweller’s intellectual interests, namely books” (153).
The implication of the tower-dweller’s intellectual interests would also be present in Yeats’s making of his tower symbol. Yeats had written of Shelley’s tower symbol in a 1900 essay titled “The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry,” in which he observes that “[t]he tower, important in Maeterlinck, as in Shelley, is, like the sea, and rivers, and caves with fountains, a very ancient symbol, and would perhaps, as years went by, have grown more important in his poetry” (E&I 87). The young Yeats read Shelley extensively and was very much influenced by the romantic poet. He interpreted Shelley’s use of the tower symbol as suggesting “the mind looking outward upon men and things” (E&I 87). In adopting the tower symbol with the Shelleyian suggestion, Yeats stresses the mind’s ability to meditate on the outward world in a detached manner. In Shelley’s Prince Athanase, the prince is described as:
His soul had wedded wisdom, and Her dower Is love and justice, clothed in which he sate Apart from men, as in a lonely tower, Pitying the tumult of their dark estate
Yeats again acknowledges Shelley’s influence on him and the prevalence of this literary symbol in a later note to the 1933 The Winding Stair and Other Poems: “In this book and elsewhere, I have used towers, and one tower in particular, as symbols and have compared their winding stairs to the philosophical gyres, but it is hardly necessary to interpret what comes from the main track of thought and expression. Shelley uses towers constantly as symbols” (VP 831).
In a 1918 poem, “The Phases of the Moon,” Yeats makes explicit the literary predecessors he has in mind by having his fictional character, Michael Robartes, observe
Yeats himself in the tower:
We are on the bridge; that shadow is the tower, And the light proves that he is reading still.
He has found, after the manner of his kind, Mere images; chosen this place to live in Because, it may be, of the candle-light From the far tower where Milton’s Platonist Sate late, or Shelley’s visionary prince:
The lonely light that Samuel Palmer engraved, An image of mysterious wisdom won by toil;
And now he seeks in book or manuscript What he shall never find. (VP 372-373)
Here the tower and its candle light are identified with the image of “mysterious wisdom won by toil,” suggested by the three literary and artistic predecessors: Milton’s Il Penseroso, Shelley’s Prince Athanase, and Samuel Palmer’s “The Lonely Tower.” These direct attributions hint at the deliberate detached attitude of the tower dweller and his willful choice of the place in hope of obtaining “mysterious wisdom.” Aware that his readers would also be familiar with these literary images, Yeats works to undermine the validity of such image by having Robartes first observe that Yeats “seeks in book or manuscript / What he shall never find” and then explain the phases of the moon to Owen Aherne while Yeats, in the tower, remains ignorant. The underlying suggestion is that the “mysterious wisdom” is never to be found in books (suggestive of the tower dweller’s intellectual interests) and through midnight
“toil.” This idea also corresponds to Yeats’s belief that “truth cannot be discovered but may be revealed, and that if a man do not lose faith, and if he goes through certain preparations, revelation will find him at the fitting moment” (VA x). Murawska argues that Yeats
“perceived the shallow nature of the tower image with its solitary light, which since Milton’s
first use of it had been too often repeated, and thus faded and withered, and become the equivalent of a theatrical prop, an empty ornamentation which hides a void” (162). Moreover, since the associations are distinctly British, it is arguable that Yeats avoided following that tradition directly. While the tower symbol already existing in British literary tradition has supplied associations relevant to Yeats’s philosophical interests, he had refused to take for granted these associations for his own tower symbol. Of course, he would also have been familiar with the negative connotations of the ivory tower that had become popular since the nineteenth century, which was derived from the tower’s enclosed and detached characteristic.
To construct his own symbol, Yeats would need associations from other sources and on a more personal level.