The Winding Stair and Other Poems Read Online

16: “targeted” here likely means carrying a round shield, or “targe.”

THE RESULTS OF THOUGHT

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

The “companion” is likely Olivia Shakespear and the “one dear brilliant woman” Lady Gregory.

GRATITUDE TO THE UNKNOWN
INSTRUCTORS

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

The “Unknown Instructors” are the spirits who inspired the automatic writing that led to Yeats’s book of esoteric philosophy, psychology, and history A Vision, first published in 1925.

REMORSE FOR INTEMPERATE SPEECH

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

STREAM AND SUN AT GLENDALOUGH

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

Glendalough (Irish for “The Valley of the Two Lakes”) is a beautiful area in the Wicklow Mountains containing an extensive monastic site known especially for its round tower.

WORDS FOR MUSIC PERHAPS

With one exception, all the poems in this sequence were published under the general title “Words for Music Perhaps” in Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1932), though Yeats lightly revised the order. He added the one exception, poem VI (“Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop”), for The Winding Stair and Other Poems (London: Macmillan, 1933). I have indicated place of first publication for only those poems in the sequence first published elsewhere.

As Yeats explained in the introductory letter to Edmund Dulac, he was recovering from a long illness and “in the spring of 1929 life returned as an impression of the uncontrollable energy and daring of the great creators ... I wrote ‘Mad as the Mist and Snow,’ a mechanical little song, and after that almost all that group of poems called in memory of those exultant weeks ‘Words for Music Perhaps.’” He told Olivia Shakespear that the title meant “not so much that they may be sung as that I may define their kind of emotion to myself. I want them to be all emotion and all impersonal”; and again that “‘For Music’ is only a name, nobody will sing them’” (L 758, 769).

I. CRAZY JANE AND THE BISHOP

First published in The London Mercury, November 1930, and The New Republic, 12 November 1930.

Yeats wrote to Olivia Shakespear in November 1931 that he based Crazy Jane on an old woman called Cracked Mary “who lives in a cottage near Gort—She has just sent Lady Gregory some flowers in spite of the season and [has] an amazing power of audacious speech. One of her great performances is a description of how the meanness of a Gort shopkeeper’s wife over the price of a glass of porter made her so despair of the human race that she got drunk” (L 785–86).

9: Yeats first used “Jack the Journeyman” as a name in a song from his play The Pot of Broth, 1903, and in a note also attributed it to Cracked Mary.

II. CRAZY JANE REPROVED

First published in The London Mercury, November 1930, and in The New Republic, 12 November 1930.

5–6: In Greek mythology the god Zeus assumes the form of a bull to carry off the Phoenician princess Europa to Crete.

III. CRAZY JANE ON THE DAY OFJUDGMENT

In Christian doctrine Judgment Day comes as part of the apocalypse at the end of time, when good and evil are judged and sent to Heaven or Hell.

VI. CRAZY JANE TALKS WITH THE BISHOP

This poem was not part of the original Words for Music Perhaps. Yeats added it for The Winding Stair and Other Poems, 1933. Yeats does not often pun in his poetry, but does so here in line 17.

VII. CRAZY JANE GROWN OLD LOOKS
AT THE DANCERS

First published in The London Mercury, November 1930, and The New Republic, 12 November 1930.

18: Thraneen is the Irish word for a blade of grass or straw.

VIII. GIRL’S SONG

First published in The New Republic, 22 October 1930.

IX. YOUNG MAN’S SONG

First published in The New Republic, 22 October 1930.

X. HER ANXIETY

First published in The New Republic, 22 October 1930.

XI. HIS CONFIDENCE

First published in The New Republic, 22 October 1930.

XII. LOVE’S LONELINESS

First published in The New Republic, 22 October 1930.

XIII. HER DREAM

First published in The New Republic, 22 October 1930.

8: For Berenice’s hair, see note to “Veronica’s Napkin,” line 1, above.

XIV. HIS BARGAIN

First published in The New Republic, 22 October 1930.

1: Glaucon discusses the “spindle of Necessity” in Book X of Plato’s Republic It resembles Yeats’s gyres in some ways; Yeats’s lover claims that his love will remain steadfast amid ongoing cyclical changes.

XV. THREE THINGS

First published in The New Republic, 2 October 1929.

XVI. LULLABY

First published in The New Keepsake (an anthology), London, 1931.

4–6: In Greek mythology Paris, son of King Priam of Troy, runs away with the wife of King Menelaus, Helen, thus precipitating the Trojan War. 8: In medieval legend such as Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur the adulterous love of the Cornish knight Tristan and Irish princess Isolde causes them to betray King Mark. 14f: In Greek legend Zeus came to Leda, wife of the king of Sparta, in the shape of a swan while she was bathing in the Eurotas river.

XVII. AFTER LONG SILENCE

This poem grew out of Yeats’s long relationship with Olivia Shakespear (1863–1938), his former lover and lifelong friend.

XVIII. MAD AS THE MIST AND SNOW

7: Horace (65–8 B.C.) was a Roman poet and author of the Ars Poetica (Art of Poetry); Homer, of course, was the Greek epic poet regarded as creator of the Iliad and Odyssey. 8: Plato (ca 429–347 B.C.) was the famous Greek philosopher and author of The Republic among other works 9: Known in English as both Tully and Cicero, Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 B.C.) was a leading Roman politician and orator 17: “many-minded” is a translation of “polymetis,” Homer’s word for Odysseus.

XIX. THOSE DANCING DAYS ARE GONE

First published in The London Mercury, November 1930, and The New Republic, 12 November 1930.

7–8: Yeats indicates in his concluding note to this volume, “The sun in a golden cup ... is a quotation from somewhere in Mr. Ezra Pound’s ‘Cantos’” The phrase comes from Pound’s Canto XXIII and in turn derives from a line in the Greek poet Stesichorus about a sunset; Yeats indicated elsewhere that silver and gold together are alchemical symbols of perfection.

XX.