On this day in 1939, just a week before his death, W. B. Yeats wrote his last poem, "The Black Tower." Two decades earlier he had purchased a Norman tower near Coole, in Galway -- Thoor Ballylee, since 1965 a Yeats museum and a popular tourist spot. Yeats was fifty-two years old when he bought it in 1917; it was a summer home, a place where his new wife would do a lot of 'automatic' writing, where his new children could holiday, where he would compose many of his most famous poems. In "The Tower," written a decade before "The Black Tower," Yeats already has an eye on death, though begrudgingly ... FULL STORY »
