![]() But the poet casts himself as this fool, and it seems to be his earnest wish to reverse the life cycle. As he points out in “The Fool by the Roadside,” only a fool thinks that life can be made to go from the end point to the beginning, instead of the other way around. Magic provides one possible solution to the crisis that the poet puzzles over throughout this collection: aging. These magical trappings are evident in many poems in The Tower, including the speaker’s ability to call on the “sages” in “Sailing to Byzantium” or the ghosts in “All Souls’ Night.” Yeats attended séances and exercised what he called “automatic writing”: writing funneled through a poet. Theosophy, a set of beliefs that declares that all religions hold some measure of truth, tends toward the fantastical in practice. Yeats was brought up in a Protestant family, but turned to theosophy when he became an intellectual. ![]() Magic is the primary spiritual form in this collection, replacing religion as a place to turn in a time of distress. ![]()
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