A Tower on the Apennine by W.B. Yeats — Read

The other day I was walking towards Urbino where I was to spend the / night, having crossed the Apennines from San Sepolcro, and had come to a / level place on the mountain top near the journey's end. My friends were / in a carriage somewhere behind, on a road which was still ascending in / great loops, and I was alone amid a visionary fantastic impossible / scenery. It was sunset and the stormy clouds hung upon mountain after / mountain, and far off on one great summit a cloud darker than the rest / glimmered with lightning. Away to the south a mediaeval tower, with no / building near nor any sign of life, rose upon its solitary summit into / the clouds. I saw suddenly in the mind's eye an old man, erect and a / little gaunt, standing in the door of the tower, while about him broke a / windy light. He was the poet who had at last, because he had done so / much for the word's sake, come to share in the dignity of the saint. He / had hidden nothing of himself but he had taken care of 'that dignity... / the perfection of form... this lofty and severe quality... this / virtue. ' And though he had but sought it for the word's sake, or for a / woman's praise, it had come at last into his body and his mind. / Certainly as he stood there he knew how from behind that laborious mood, / that pose, that genius, no flower of himself but all himself, looked out / as from behind a mask that other Who alone of all men, the country / people say, is not a hair's breadth more nor less than six feet high. He / has in his ears well instructed voices and seeming solid sights are / before his eyes, and not as we say of many a one, speaking in metaphor, / but as this were Delphi or Eleusis, and the substance and the voice come / to him among his memories which are of women's faces; for was it / Columbanus or another that wrote 'There is one among the birds that is / perfect, and one perfect among the fish. '