From Meditations in Time of Civil War

• The Tower begins with an exposition of the poet's fixation: how to escape aging. In "Sailing to Byzantium," he dreams of leaving Ireland, a young man's country, to be reincarnated as a singing mechanical bird in a Byzantine Court.
•  In "The Tower," Yeats laments his lost love for Maude Gonne, and ruminates on how to reconcile the difference between his youthful spirit and his aging body. "Meditations in a Time of Civil War" and "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen" are the most explicitly historical poems of this collection; the former is an intensely personal account of Yeats' family history and his place in the Civil War, the second a more universal account of the chaos that gripped Ireland from 1922 to 1923.