The Question and Answer section for Poems of W.B. Yeats: The Tower is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.
The poem traces the speaker’s movement from youth to age, and the corresponding geographical move from Ireland, a country just being born as Yeats wrote, to Byzantium. Yeats felt that he no longer belonged in Ireland, as the young or the young in...
The speaker only has a few lines to convey that core emotions like lust and rage need not be pejorative. The speaker still wants passion in his life. He wants to feel flashes of youth that still lay within his spirit.
The speaker prays to be passionate about life in his old age rather than reasonable and predictable. He wants to feel young inside rather that than old.
