"The Tower" is a poem by the Irish

Ireland

Ireland is an island to the northwest of continental Europe. It is the third-largest island in Europe and the twentieth-largest island on Earth...

 poet William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and playwright, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms...

. It is a passionate indictment of a man wrestling with age. It is the second poem in The Tower

The Tower (book)

The Tower was a book of poems by William Butler Yeats, published in 1928.The title, which the book shares with the second poem, refers to the Thoor Ballylee castle which Yeats purchased and lived in for some time with his family....

, a 1928 collection of Yeats's poems.

Below appears a small extract from the poem:

What shall I do with this absurdity -

O heart, O troubled heart - this caricature,

Decrepit age that has been tied to me

As to a dog's tail?

Never had I more

Excited, passionate, fantastical

Imagination, nor an ear and eye

That more expected the impossible -

No, not in boyhood when with rod and fly,

Or the humbler worm, I climbed Ben Bulben's back

And had the livelong summer day to spend.

It seems that I must bid the Muse go pack,

Choose Plato and Plotinus for a friend

Until imagination, ear and eye,

Can be content with argument and deal

In abstract things; or be derided by

A sort of battered kettle at the heel.

W.B.Yeats