Another less universal, more esoteric (but perhaps equally important) aspect of the tower symbol comes from the associations derived from the Tarot trump, “The Tower,” and its associated meanings in the doctrines of the Golden Dawn. Given Yeats’s interest in the occult and his involvement in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn during the 1890s, it should be worthwhile to bear in mind his knowledge of the Tarot pack, which was associated by Golden Dawn members with the Kabbalistic Tree of Life and were used for rituals and divination. In the Tarot, “The Tower” is the sixteenth card in the Major Arcana. In Yeats’s Italian pack, the card shows a tower hit by lightning, its top struck open. In the Rider-Waite deck, which were drawn by Pamela Coleman Smith following the directions of A. E. Waite, both of whom were former Golden Dawn members, the card shows a tall tower on a high cliff, and its burning roof, which is also a crown, is struck off by a zigzag of lightning; two figures are falling out of the tower, their arms spreading wide, and bits of fire can be seen on the top of the tower and its windows. This image corresponds to the Golden Dawn interpretation of the card: “The Tower” represents the Tower of Babel struck by the Fire from Heaven. Yeats,
as an Adept in the Golden Dawn, could not have failed to grasp this particular aspect of the symbol.
Kathleen Raine was among the first Yeatsian scholars to have established detailed connections of the Tarot symbols as they appear in Yeats’s work. In the chapter titled “Yeats, the Tarot and the Golden Dawn” in her book Yeats the Initiate, Raine traces the history of the Tarot, the central doctrines of Golden Dawn, and Yeats’s understanding of both, to make sense of his use of Tarot symbols in his work. Raine identifies major Tarot symbols, such as The Fool, The Magician, The Star, The Hermit, and The Tower, among others, as they appear in Yeats’s Red Hanrahan stories and certain poems, where their symbolic meanings add to the interpretative possibilities of the text. Raine’s reading is framed in the context of Golden Dawn doctrines, by which the symbol of the tower represents a higher power descending down the Tree of Life, that is, from the divine to the human. However, since the Golden Dawn teachings decree that ultimate truth is to be obtained by toiling upward the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, divine inspiration coming downward is both unusual and unasked-for.
Combined with the Golden Dawn interpretation of the Tower as the Tower of Babel struck by the fire from Heaven, the tower itself can be understood, as Raine argues, as “the edifice of human knowledge,” and the lightening as “the descent of inspiration” (245). However, Raine seems to have taken the Tower Trump as symbolizing wisdom, while in fact the card does not symbolize wisdom. While her reading points out the intellectual implication of the card, it does not address the suggestion of imminent change and the possibility of ill omen that are also inherent in the Tower trump.
Edward Larrissy elaborates on Raine’s reading of the Tower and proposes a more informed interpretation of the connection between Yeats’s tower and the Tarot symbol. Firstly, if the symbol of the tower represents divine power or inspiration descending down the Tree of Life, as opposed to the “normal” (or usual) upward path, it could also be interpreted as “God inverted,” which is also Yeats’s secret Golden Dawn name, Demon est Deus Inversus (DEDI).
Thus, Larrissy argues that in a sense “the Tower had always been Yeats’s emblem” (165).
Moreover, as far as the tower symbol is interpreted in relation to Tarot readings, Larrissy proposes a valuable observation, which I think deserve quoting in length:
There is another point to bear in mind about the Tarot: each card may be regarded from two closely related aspects, a favourable and an unfavourable. From a favourable point of view the Tower suggests the descent of a dangerous but renovating inspiration, for both individual and society, one that is both ‘Destroyer and Preserver,’ in Shelley’s phrase. But unfavourably aspected it suggests destruction merely, God’s wrath at the Tower of Babel. From either point of view, this tower is one from which to contemplate the advent of a social crisis. The Golden Dawn initiates, their minds stocked with Kabbalah, would have thought that the card referred to Babel. There the point at issue between God and the descendents of Noah was not only the hubris of building to the skies, but the related facts that enabled them to do this: settling in one place and giving themselves “a name” in their “one language” (Genesis 11:1-9). The Tower signifies for Yeats a naming and a settling. (166, emphasis mine)
Larrissy’s reading makes two closely related points about the tower symbol and its relevancy to Yeats’s tower and his later poetry. First, the “naming” and “settling” are both crucial in terms of Yeats’s imagining of his relation to Ireland: the “naming” corresponds to his renaming of his tower, and the “settling” to his desire to settle down and be “rooted” in the land. Then, “the advent of a social crisis” entails change brought by an outward force and ensuing uncertainties. In other words, while the nature of the outward force may remain ambivalent, the tower symbol clearly suggests a moment of change and instability. Lloyd, commenting on Yeats’s later poetry, also notes that “in the Tarot the tower is the card not of permanence but of imminent change” (75). As poems in The Tower testify, such an emblem is a most fitting one to bear witness to a turbulent time, a time of crisis and upheaval, when even the ruin and destruction of the tower is explicitly prophesied.
In Esoteric Symbols: The Tarot in Yeats, Eliot, and Kafka, June Leavitt adds another point about Yeats’s tower symbol in relation to the Tower trump. In addition to identifying the tower as “represent[ing] an apocalyptic crisis which will bring forth a higher consciousness,”
she points out that in Yeats’s later poetry the tower is also “a symbol of mystical ascension,”
which is “meant to convey the spirit of strength to the poet” (138). If we recall the context of the 1920s outlined in chapter one, when Yeats had to take up challenges posed by his role and chosen identification, “the spirit of strength” becomes a particularly appropriate and desirable characteristic of the poet’s sign. And indeed, in “The Tower,” the nature of the tower as a fortress is clearly implied.
Having sketched out some of the associations that can be derived from Yeats’s occult knowledge, I must pause and stress that the purpose of bringing up the Tarot reading of the Tower trump is not to dictate a particular kind of interpretation of the symbol. The “esoteric”
side of the tower is taken up here because it provides a new perspective in understanding Yeats’s construction of his tower symbol. After all, it cannot be denied that the occult and esoteric side often has equal importance for Yeats as his literary traditions. As for the Tarot reading of the Tower trump, undoubtedly there is more than one way to interpret the card, just as there are numerous associations inherent in the “ancient” tower symbol. The critical surveys cited above represent some of the most relevant ways to investigate Yeats’s tower symbol in the occult tradition. By its suggestion of a time of change and crisis, the tower symbol provides meanings on a more personal level.
Metaphoric Topography of the Actual Tower, Thoor Ballylee
So far, I have investigated some key associations that are most relevant to Yeats’s tower symbol. While these associations are derived from hybrid traditions, I suggest that Yeats’s tower symbol is an invented one rather than simply an adopted one. In Yeats’s later poetry, the symbol is distinctly Yeatsian, complicated by the poet’s imaginative impositions and
created anew. This is made possible by its having a direct referent in the real tower, Thoor Ballylee. As Daniel A. Harris argues, the tower symbol could not be fully understood without taking its real referent, Thoor Ballylee, into consideration:
No compilation of the visual and literary sources which filtered through [Yeats’s]
imagination as he made his greatest poetry—the ‘topless towers of Ilium,’ the towers of Maeterlinck, Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, and the Tarot pack—can explain the wholeness of Thoor Ballylee. This is because the tower is not an adopted symbol but an ancient image built anew in Yeats’s mind; the allusions, the history contained within it belong in the most intimate way to Yeats himself. What is most radical about the tower is how far Yeats managed, poetically, to transmute the prima materia of its stone into a spiritual presence without denying the physical solidity of his place (94, original emphasis)
For Yeats, the significance of the tower extends well beyond the symbolic level. While the tower in the poetry does not always refer to his tower, poems in The Tower that make use of the tower image do point to this particular tower, the only real estate Yeats had ever owned.
As he wrote before actually moving into the tower, he was “making a setting for [his] old age, a place to influence lawless youth with its severity & antiquity” (CL, to John Quinn, 23 July 1918). Another letter makes it more explicit: “I am making this gaunt tower the centre of many poems. It is a deliberately chosen symbol of some difficult truths” (CL, to the Marchioness of Londonderry, 23 July 1923). Seminal poems such as “The Tower” and
“Meditations in Time of Civil War” were written inside the walls of Thoor Ballylee during the early 1920s and owed their gestation to the place. It is this real-life referent that distinguishes the tower symbol from other more abstract Yeatsian symbols (such as the rose, tree, mask, hawk, among others).
Thoor Ballylee provides for Yeats both artistic and domestic functions. The land on which it stands was rich in historical connections and promised a sense of continuity. Yeats,
who had been drawn to the folk tales in the area, would surely see the land as analogous to authentic Irish spirit. He would have believed, as Declan Kiberd argues, that “places and things needed to be emancipated just as much as people did, to be reanimated with spirit and rescued from mere ownership,” a process that “must begin with the landscape itself” (Irish Classics 47). Thus, he would have endeavored to establish a connection with the land, in order to be its spokesperson. Larrissy points out that Yeats’s decision to rename his tower
“signifies the poet’s assumption of an ‘original relation’ to Ireland, his marriage to ‘rock and hill’” (161-162, emphasis mine). The name Thoor Ballylee, while a compromise and a kind of hybrid, is “quoted” and thus “somehow self-conscious and picturesque” (162).
In order to fully grasp the importance of Thoor Ballylee in becoming Yeats’s tower symbol and the place of writing, we need to first review Yeats’s relation to and his idea about place. As critics have pointed out, places and place names figure prominently in Yeats’s work.
In the introduction to Yeats in Context, David Holdeman and Ben Levitas point out that Yeats’s writing is “notably cartographic: rich in allusion to landscape, often construing in potent symbolic terms the localities he held to be significant” (4). In Yeats’s early work, the readers often find allusion to or direct naming of specific localities in the Irish West, mostly around his maternal hometown of Sligo. For instance, the first part of his autobiographies, Reveries over Childhood and Youth, contains numerous references to memories of Sligo and its people, even though he spent relatively little time of his childhood there. For the young Yeats, the attraction of such places was that he saw them as a direct link to the primitive energy which he believed still alive in the Irish West. The possibility that the place granted, of another world out there, was nourished and developed into a significant aspect of his early evolving thought. As Nicholas Grene observes: “[t]he Sligo locality was so important in his imagination because of its mythological associations, because of its fairy legends, but above all because it contained ‘places of unearthly resort’ on his own home territory” (79). As such, the poet stands in some directly expressive or interpretive relationship to the milieu and has a
grateful or “filial” relation to the place (Heaney, Place of Writing 21), receiving inspiration from it and owing his imaginative impulse to it.
As has been mentioned in chapter one, during the 1890s Yeats had believed that the time was ripe for shaping a consciousness that would help unify Ireland and its people, and he took upon himself as his responsibility to forge that unified consciousness. It was during this time that he became interested in the folk tales of the country people, and he collaborated with Lady Gregory to collect them around Galway. This is partly a continuation of his belief in the mythical power inherent in the locality. He saw in the folk tales the unifying energy native to the land, which would be a fit rallying force for the liberation of his nation. By re-creating and re-presenting the mythologies in his work, he believed that he was being their spokesperson. As Jonathan Allison notes, “[t]hrough his own knowledge of Sligo and Gregory’s knowledge of Galway, Yeats feels he is in contact with the ancient folklife of Connacht, rooted in particular locales such as Ben Bulben, Knocknarea, Ballylee, and perhaps also Coole” (“Galway” 102). However, for an Anglo-Irish Protestant artist like Yeats, whose identity and identification was often troubled, it becomes a pressing issue to justify his right to speak for the land, just as he had to create an “original relation” to the place. Kiberd argues that the act of collecting folktales represents a strategy for the Irish Protestant imagination to identify with the new national sentiment in the revival period. Protestant artists, for whom history “can only be a painful accusation against their own people,” turn to geography “in the attempt at patriotization” (Inventing Ireland 107); by emphasizing locality, they were deliberately aligning themselves with the Gaelic bardic tradition of dinnsheanchas (knowledge of the lore of places)” (Inventing Ireland 107).
Kiberd is quick to point out the underlying strained nature of such act. For Yeats, who had spent considerable time of his childhood in England, it was much easier to reinvent for himself an idealized version of Ireland and romanticized construction of the harmonious coexistence between Protestant landlords and Catholic peasants. After the disappointments of
the early 1910s and the Easter Rising that had shifted public sentiments, his cultural nationalism was no longer a viable means for him to envision the founding of the new nation.
The dreamy tone and the mythologizing of the past were replaced by a more solid imagining in the face of tumult and violence, which is reflected in his changed perception of his relation to place. As Richard Ellmann points out, Yeats’s relationship with place and locality grew more specific in his old age, and this strong sense of particular place has contributed to the solidity of his mature poetry (Identity 146). Places are clearly named and identified, instead of being vaguely referred to. The Irish West retained its charm for him, but in the late 1910s and the 1920s he had taken on a more domineering posture towards his relation with place.
He envisioned the ideal metaphor for such relation as being rooted in the land. Hassett points out that “rooting” had important connotations in Yeats’s thinking about poetic inspiration, and argues that Yeats “pictured creativity…in terms of the self-delighting soul that…springs from its own principles, ‘branching out like a tree from the root’” (143). The idea and merit of rootedness was already made explicit in the 1919 poem “A Prayer for My Daughter,” in which the poet, then newly a father, prays for Anne Yeats that “O may she live like some green laurel / Rooted in one dear perpetual place” (VP 405). If the young Yeats imagined place as a source of inspiration, spiritual regeneration, and connectedness to his native land, as the much anthologized “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” suggests, such place for him existed in memory, a place from which the poet is absent and which he describes from a place of exile.
On the other hand, in his mature poetry, aided and reinforced by the symbol of his tower, it was no longer ethereal fairies and spirits that occupied his imagination, but a real and ancient building rising from the land, indeed “deep-rooted” in the earth, a place in which he truly lives and feels connected to. As Grene argues, “What Yeats looked out on from the tower was no longer a magic countryside like the numinous places of the early Sligo poetry or the first Coole poems where the gods walked in the woods, but a historiated vista” (96). Yeats’s tower would be the real-life emblem of that rootedness which he had sought to establish. It is “the
physical embodiment of his desire to root himself in historic Irish soil” (Cullingford, “How Many Jacques Molay Got Up The Tower” 777).
Then, why should the tower symbol be considered so important to our better understanding of the poems in The Tower? As I have suggested, the fact that The Tower takes its title from “the tower” is already proof of its centrality in the book. At this point, it is also worthwhile to mention the cover of The Tower, designed by Yeats’s artist friend T. Sturge Moore, which shows an image of Thoor Ballylee, a four-square tower, and its adjoining cottage, embossed in dark green against a gold background, all reflected in flowing water.
Yeats’s instruction to Moore about the design makes clear that “the Tower should not be too unlike the real object or rather…it should suggest the real object. I like to think of that building as a permanent symbol of my work plainly visible to the passerby. As you know all my art theories depend upon just this—rooting of mythology in the earth” (CL, to T. Sturge Moore, 21 September 1927). Yeats was satisfied with Moore’s design of the water, writing to tell him that he had “completed the tower symbolism by surrounding it with water” (CL, to T.
Sturge Moore, 2 June 1927). He also considered Moore’s cover design “a most rich, grave &
beautiful design & admirably like the place” (CL, to T. Sturge Moore, 23 February 1928).
The cover design testifies to what Foster believes to be Yeats’s “great architectural and historical symbol realized in a great book” (362).
The Place of Writing
In The Place of Writing, Seamus Heaney proposes that “the poetic imagination in its
In The Place of Writing, Seamus Heaney proposes that “the poetic imagination in its