Building Thoor Ballylee: ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’, The Tower (1928)

This chapter discusses Yeats’s full-scale tower-writing during his longest stay at Ballylee in wartime from April to September 1922. Yeats renamed his property ‘Thoor Ballylee’ by the end of March 1922 and worked on the most sustained imaginative construction with his first tower sequence, ultimately titled ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’. It was on its inclusion in The Cat and the Moon and Certain Poems (1924) that Yeats began to use paratextual notes to anchor his textual tower in its actual place. Completion of the bedroom in the tower at Ballylee, which also served as his study, virtually coincided with the outbreak of the Irish Civil War, providing him with a place of retreat to meditate on the political conflict as well as on the tower itself. The chapter examines the dramatic development of the compositional process in which the poems on the tower and on the Civil War were eventually integrated into his first tower sequence, his self-consciously designed symbolic edifice in seven parts.