The Winding Stair and Other Poems Read Online

Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (New York: Macmillan, 1955)

INTRODUCTION:
THE DESIGN OF YEATS’S
THE WINDING STAIR AND
OTHER POEMS

The Winding Stair and Other Poems is Yeats’s longest separate volume of verse. It includes sixty-four different poems (by contrast, the preceding volume, The Tower, has only thirty-six), among them such Yeatsian masterpieces as “A Dialogue of Self and Soul,” “Byzantium,” the Coole Park poems, “Vacillation,” and two separately titled long sequences ending with the exquisite lyric “From the ‘Antigone.’ ” Because that length renders a poem-by-poem commentary unfeasible here, I focus instead on the design of the volume, meaning first its symbolic cover, on which Yeats collaborated with his friend and favorite book designer, T. Sturge Moore, and then the revealing overall arrangement of poems within the resultant book. But first, a word about reading Yeats’s poetry beyond the obvious and customary focus on verse form on the one hand and thematic concerns (history, biography, gender, philosophy, and the like) on the other.

As Hugh Kenner pointed out early on, Yeats did not simply write poems, he wrote books of poems. Yeats famously invoked in “Adam’s Curse” the time he spent “stitching and unstitching” the lines. He also spent considerable time stitching and unstitching the poems to each other. The surviving manuscripts sport masses of alternate lists of orderings for his various volumes, and he often re-revised those orderings for subsequent editions. He did the same thing for collected editions of his work at various times throughout his life. There are even two alternate orderings for his collected poems as a whole, both approved by him at different moments during the 1930s. Partisans of one or the other ordering often claim that their preferred arrangement is the true one, but the important point seems the very existence of alternate placements sanctioned by the poet himself. Within each volume, the first thing to note is that the arrangement of poems is never chronological by date of composition. Yeats strove to make that clear even to those of us who are not advanced textual scholars, for example by the dates he sometimes supplied for his individual poems. Thus, he dated the first four poems of The Tower volume in this way: “Sailing to Byzantium” 1927, “The Tower” lyric 1926, “Meditations in Time of Civil War” 1923, and, of course, “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” in the title year. In the case of The Winding Stair and Other Poems, Yeats not only composed the opening “In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz” and closing “From the ‘Antigone’ ” at nearly the same time but even used the same manuscript pages for some of the drafts. So if the ordering is not chronological, what is it? It is usually both thematic and formal instead, and often displays a dynamically developing argument in which poems interact with and “correct” each other. Hostile critics of Yeats often fail to notice that the poems they like to critique most, such as “The Gyres” or “Under Ben Bulben,” open volumes whose subsequent contents critique them more fully than the critics themselves do, as the poems move downward upon life and upon more human and humane concerns.

The Winding Stair (1933) appeared relatively late in Yeats’s life, when he was sixty-eight. One of the great things about reading Yeats is that one sees different things at different ages. When I first encountered him at seventeen, for example, I found that the line “I thought it all out twenty years ago” expressed a fabulous, almost mythological amount of time. Now, as the country singer Waylon Jennings reminds us, I would say to that seventeen-year-old self, “I’ve got heartaches older than you.” Reading him at sixty-eight, I find myself drawn repeatedly to those poems about overall patterns of life, history, and personal experience. The volume itself puts together (with some rearrangement) two separate earlier books of Yeats—The Winding Stair (1929) and Words for Music Perhaps (1932), both published by small, fine printing presses.