Restoring the Tower at Ballylee in Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921)

This chapter addresses two milestones in Yeats’s tower project in Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921): ‘A Prayer for My Daughter’ and ‘To be Carved on a Stone at Ballylee’ (to whose title ‘Thoor’ was added in 1922). The chapter focuses on the unpredictably anomalous developments of these two tower poems in the making. Close analyses of ‘A Prayer for My Daughter’ (in which a direct reference to the tower emerged at a late stage of composition) and the inscription poem (which, after radical revisions, was added in Yeats’s hand to the book’s page proofs) document the dynamism of Yeats’s tower construction at this stage. The chapter also discusses the intertextuality between Yeats’s tower poems and his Rebellion-related poems, which were finally included in the Cuala volume at the height of political tension.