Epilogue The Tower

Abstract

For Yeats the Tower is a symbol of the conscious soul struggling toward the difficult achievement of wisdom. Indeed, it becomes an image sometimes for the essential loneliness of human life in our age of the ‘consciousness soul’: the sage or poet in his necessary isolation, at midnight burning his solitary light while his creations move through the world with a freedom he himself lacks, perhaps mocking him slightly as do Aherne and Robartes in ‘The Phases of the Moon’. Milton’s Platonist lives on here, and in the painting of Samuel Palmer to which Yeats refers. But we must now pose a last question. Is it really the visionary knowledge Milton attributed to his lonely sage which still feeds the modern sensibility of a Yeats? The former brooded on ‘thrice great Hermes’ and summoned:

The spirit of Plato to unfold

What Worlds, or what vast Regions hold

Th’ immortal mind that hath forsook

Her mansion in this fleshly nook.