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uncertainty of his setting forth?

What was the relationship between youth and old age? Were they recognisable to one another?

Plato thought nature but a spume that plays

Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;

Solider Aristotle played the taws

Upon the bottom of a king of kings;

World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras

Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings

What a star sang and careless muses heard:

Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.

The women in front of him were nuns who worshipped abstract images rather than flesh and blood, but both statues and children represent a higher Presence and simultaneously mock their origins:

Both nuns and mothers worship images,

But those the candles light are not as those

That animate a mother's reveries,

But keep a marble or a bronze repose.

And yet they too break hearts - O Presences

That passion, piety or affection knows,

And that all heavenly glory symbolise -

O self-born mockers of man's enterprise;

The life of each human being does not have to include what their parents' lives included. The dance or blossoming of the individual does not have to encompass harm to the physical self, or destructive beauty leading to hardship, or the hours spent writing out poems at night:

Labour is blossoming or dancing where

The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,

Nor beauty born out of its own despair,

Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.

The life he has inaugurated with Lily is likened to part of a chestnut tree; if it is the leaf it will last a season and wither away; if the blossom it will have a good life and produce seed for next season; if the bole it will provide the line of descendants of his future family. He ends with a heart-rending question: how can we identify the results in flesh of our passion? How can he identify his son by Lily?

O chestnut tree, great-rooted blossomer,

Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Thus the poem shows clearly that Yeats did suffer sexually, emotionally and morally by the absence of Lily and felt bereft at losing contact with his son, Lily's child. Moreover this suffering lasted for around three years judging from the other poems written around this period.

He also suffered socially. He lost his previous friends, who stayed away for the first few years of his grief, and he also lost his colleagues in the Senate House, which he left the following year. He was no longer a candidate for honorary degrees or Nobel prizes in Ireland, and his good relations with the Parliamentarians in London faded away. His involvement with the Abbey Theatre was ended and in Dublin he dared not look at a younger woman for fear of gossip. His children were sent abroad to boarding school to protect them from rumours or worse. Even his life was under attack, as were those of the other members of the Senate: his new friend, Kevin O'Higgins the Defence Minister was murdered by the Republicans in 1927. Was it a reprisal for the death of Lily O'Neill?

He expressed his bitterness in politics, establishing with Eoin O'Duffy the Blue Shirts to march and parade in the shadow of Hitler's Black Shirts, but soon even this became untenable, so he moved with George to the home of his friend Ezra Pound in Rapallo, Italy for a while. Even though the couple had bought a house south of Dublin, he spent most of his latter years abroad.

[1] The edition I used was Everyman: The Poems: W. B. Yeats, published by J. M. Dent, London 1990, reprinted 1991, updated 1994, edited by Daniel Albright.

[2] "The Tower: Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen" by W. B. Yeats

[3] Ibid, Notes: The Tower, page 636

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