He was the dominant figure in “Grattan’s Parliament” (”Grattan’s house” in the poem), which was dissolved by the Act of Union in 1800, after which he served as M.P. for Dublin, 1806–20. 6: Berkeley wrote a book advocating the medicinal properties of tar water, used thus by some Native Americans; his recipe favored pouring a gallon of water over a quart of tar and then stirring and draining. 7: “Stella” was Swift’s name for Esther Johnson (d. 1728), his presumably Platonic lover; he published his letters to her in Journal to Stella. 9: the Whig party in English politics grew out of liberal aristocrats supporting the Protestant William III against the Catholic James II; Burke and Swift were originally Whigs before moving toward the Tories. Yeats associated Whiggery with leveling and materialism. 20: “Burke’s great melody” would be his speeches and writings, in which a common theme is emancipation: the emancipation of the American colonies, of Irish trade and Catholics, of India from the rule of the East India Company, and of France from what he saw as the eventual tyranny of the French Revolution. 21: Goldsmith sang of rural poverty and depopulation in his famous poem “The Deserted Village.” 23: Trefoil refers to three-leaved plants, of which the lesser yellow trefoil is also known as the shamrock.

THE CRAZED MOON

First published in Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1932).

The poem draws upon Yeats’s theories of phases of the moon as metaphor for psychological and historical phases in his book of esoteric philosophy A Vision, of which the first version appeared in 1925.

COOLE PARk, 1929

First published in Lady Gregory, Coole (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1931), and then in Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1932).

Coole Park was the County Galway estate of Yeats’s patron, friend, and collaborator the nationalist and author Lady Augusta Gregory (1852–1932). Forced by financial circumstances to sell it to the Forestry Commission, she remained on as tenant for the remaining five years of her life. Yeats’s prose draft reads: “Describe house in first stanza. Here Synge came, Hugh Lane, Shaw Taylor [sic], many names. I too in my timid youth. Coming and going like migratory birds. Then address the swallows fluttering in their dream like circles. Speak of the rarity of the circumstances that bring together such concords of men. Each man more than himself through whom an unknown life speaks. A circle ever returning into itself.”

9: Douglas Hyde (1860–1949), Irish poet and translator, was the first president of the Gaelic League and later of Ireland. Yeats thought that immersion in practical affairs had blunted his prose style. 11: The “one that ruffled in a manly pose” is likely Yeats himself. 13: John Synge (1871–1909), Irish playwright, poet, and translator, wrote the controversial masterpiece Playboy of the Western World and served as codirector of the Abbey Theatre along with Lady Gregory and Yeats himself. 14: John Shawe-Taylor (1866–1911) and Hugh Lane (1875–1915) were both nephews of Lady Gregory. After an early military career including service in the Boer War, Shawe-Taylor became a leader in Irish land reform; Lane was an art collector and critic who in a well-meaning but controversial move offered his impressive collection to the Dublin Corporation if it would build an art gallery to house it.

COOLE AND BALLYLEE, 1931

First published in Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1932).

Yeats’s Thoor Ballylee stands near Lady Gregory’s Coole Park in County Galway; he bought the tower partly to have a home base nearby. Yeats liked to imagine that the stream flowing past his tower ended up in Coole Lake via an underground passage.

4: The Gaelic poet Anthony Rafferty (1784–1835) was blind, hence Yeats’s word “dark” for him. Rafferty wrote often of the region, and Yeats particularly liked to invoke his praise of the young beauty Mary Hynes. One of his lines declares, “There is a strong cellar in Ballylee.” 26: The “somebody” would be Lady Gregory herself, then in steep decline. 44: “the book of the people” is a phrase used by Rafferty that Yeats quoted in Explorations, 215. 47: Yeats invoked the ancient Greek poet Homer several times in his poetry, including another linkage with Rafferty in section II of “The Tower.”

FOR ANNE GREGORY

First published in Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1932) and in The Spectator, 2 December 1932.

Anne Gregory (1911–2008) was the daughter of Robert Gregory and granddaughter of Lady Gregory. She has an ironic account of Yeats composing and then reading her the poem in her brief memoir Me and Nu: Childhood at Coole.

SWIFT’S EPITAPH

First published in The Dublin Magazine, October-December 1931 and then in Words for MUSM Perhaps and Other Poems (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1932).

The poem is a close adaptation of the Latin epithet composed for himself by Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), whom Yeats also invokes in “Blood and the Moon” and “The Seven Sages.” Swift’s tomb is in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin.

AT ALGECIRAS—A MEDITATION UPON DEATH

First published in A Packet for Ezra Pound (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1929) and, after two magazine printings, in Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1932).

Algeciras is a city in southern Spain, near Gibraltar, where Yeats recuperated from lung congestion in late 1928.

3–6: Morocco is on the northern coast of Africa, across the Strait of Gibraltar from Algeciras.