Anticipatory Construction in The Wild Swans at Coole (1919)

This chapter addresses the genesis and early developments of Yeats’s tower in his poetry as well as the circumstances of his acquisition and renovation of Ballylee Castle, County Galway. Chronologically examining five tower-related poems included in The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), the chapter discusses the process in which Yeats carefully constructed each aspect of the tower one by one, ‘layer upon layer’, often in tandem with the progress of the work of restoration at Ballylee. Reading the poems as a sort of a sequence which presents a drama of a poetic builder who has launched a new enterprise, the chapter offers a dynamic and diachronic view of Yeats’s tower in the early stages of development.