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Love and Death in Yeats's "The Tower"Lee, Kyung-soo Yeats's fatal love for Maud Gonne yielded so many melancholy and beautiful love poems. They are mostly incorporated in his early and middle collections of poems such as The Wind Among the Reeds(1899), In the Seven Woods(1904), and The Wild Swans at Coole(1919). The 'decisive' significance of Maud Gonne in the poet's life and art, however, could better be seen in his mature poems that do not directly concern themselves with his love for Maud Gonne. "The Tower", the title poem of mature Yeats's collection The Tower(1928), probably provides the foremost example. "The Tower" is, of course, a poem glorifying the power of imagination, or that of artistic creation. And the poet primarily wants to overcome his impending death imaginatively in this poem. At the heart of the magnificent imagination exercised by the old poet confronting death, however, lies the "fantastical imagination" for Maud Gonne: problems of love and death are inextricably related in this poem. The poet accordingly has first to come up with an answer to the problem of his unaccomplished love for Maud Gonne, if he is to confront death with faith and pride and to create imaginatively a peaceful death of his own. At first, the poet falteringly approaches the delicate problem of his defeated love for Maud Gonne. But with the help of Hanrahan, his imaginative creation and his artistic mask, he eventually triumphs over his defeated love, transforming his relationship to Maud Gonne: himself now a victimizer, not a victim, of love. Coming up with such an artistic answer to the problem of his unaccomplished love, he proceeds to complete his imaginative self-transformation: a transformation from a potential victim of death into its sovereign. Thus, at the end of the poem, we find the poet at peaceful reconciliation with death.
