The first, The Winding Stair (1929) from Fountain Press in New York, included the first five poems of the later Winding Stair volume and then the concluding sequence “A Woman Young and Old.” The second, Words for Music Perhaps, contained the rest of the final volume except for “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop.” Yeats rearranged the contents considerably when he placed “Words for Music Perhaps” between the first five poems and the concluding sequence of the original Winding Stair volume, including moving the opening poem, “Byzantium,” to later in the book. He thus reprinted neither of the two main components of the final Winding Stair volume in their original order, but instead divided the 1929 volume into two parts and placed the rearranged “Words for Music Perhaps” between them. Further, adding the phrase “and Other Poems” to the title differentiated it from most of the other volumes of collected poems, with titles like The Wind Among the Reeds, Responsibilities, and Michael Robartes and the Dancer. “And Other Poems” suggested that perhaps this grouping made not quite as tight a unity as most others, though it does display wonderful architectonics of its own.

To begin with, The Winding Stair and Other Poems forms a near diptych with the preceding Tower volume. Yeats’s own tower at Ballylee dominates both books; indeed, the title “The Winding Stair” itself refers to the spiral staircase inside Yeats’s renovated Norman tower. The pairing carries over to individual poems as well: for example, The Tower opens with “Sailing to Byzantium” while The Winding Stair offers its companion piece “Byzantium,” which itself opened the Words for Music Perhaps volume. And The Tower contains the eleven-poem sequence “A Man Young and Old,” which ends with the brief lyric “From ‘Oedipus at Colonus,’” while The Winding Stair contains its companion eleven-poem sequence “A Woman Young and Old,” which ends with the lyric “From the ‘Antigone.’” Even the word “winding” in the title echoes the last word of the Tower volume, “wound.”

The linkage carries over to the cover designs, too, both of them symbolic renderings by the same artist, T. Sturge Moore. Yeats repeatedly arranged for Moore to do covers for his work and corresponded with him about components of the design. The cover for this volume and its twin, The Tower, display paired geometric designs. The one for The Tower features Yeats’s Norman tower at Ballylee along with the cottages at its base and the river that flows past it and reflects the scene, in accord with one of Yeats’s favorite Hermetic adages, “as above, so below.” The design thus calls attention to the philosophic, geographic, and historical underpinning of the volume, and through the tower structure its ties to Yeats’s artistic and personal life as well. “I like to think of that building as a permanent symbol of my work,” wrote Yeats to Moore. “As you know, all my art theories depend upon just this—rooting of mythology in the earth” (LTSM 114). Moore wrote back, “I think that the Tower is recognizably your Tower and not anyone else’s.” And of course Moore’s cover highlights the major poem “The Tower” as well as the use of that image throughout the volume. Correspondingly, the winding staircase of the present volume highlights that feature of the tower along with its symbolic overtones, such as the gyres that Yeats saw patterning both history and personal experience. The design features, too, the fire that flickers throughout the volume, most notably in those “Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit, / Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame” in “Byzantium.” The same poem supplied the cock at the top left and the dolphin carrying a human being at the bottom center. Moore had written Yeats to inquire, “Is your dolphin to be so large that the whole of humanity can ride on its back?” to which Yeats pithily responded, “One dolphin, one man,” and that is what the resultant design shows (LTSM 164–65; see p.xxxv of the present edition).

Yeats invokes the flames on Moore’s symbolic cover first in the opening poem of the volume, his elegy “In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz.” Mindful of the impossibility of exploring everything in the volume, I stress here that opening poem, the key middle ones on Coole Park, and the successive alternate endings to the volume formed by “Stream and Sun at Glendalough,” “The Delphic Oracle upon Plotinus,” and finally the chorus “From the ‘Antigone.’” Note that the opening, middle, and closing poems are all about women. In the opening one, Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz were, of course, the daughters of the Sir Henry Gore-Booth family, which owned Lissadell House, near Sligo in the West of Ireland. Eva (the “gazelle” in the poem) grew up to become, improbably, a labor organizer, mystic, and writer, while Constance (who had been presented as a debutante at the court of Queen Victoria) became a famous Irish nationalist leader, imprisoned for her part in the Easter Rising of 1916, and later a worker among the poor in Dublin, with more than 100,000 people attending her funeral. Both had recently passed away when Yeats composed his elegy. He divided it into two parts marked by a space break.

The first section focuses on the two Gore-Booths as girls or young women and has an intimate relation to the quatrain form rhyming abba, which runs through the entire poem. Here is the first section:

The light of evening, Lissadell,

Great windows open to the south,

Two girls in silk kimonos, both

Beautiful, one a gazelle.

But a raving autumn shears

Blossom from the summer’s wreath;

The older is condemned to death,

Pardoned, drags out lonely years

Conspiring among the ignorant.

I know not what the younger dreams—

Some vague Utopia—and she seems,

When withered old and skeleton-gaunt,

An image of such politics.

Many a time I think to seek

One or the other out and speak

Of that old Georgian mansion, mix

Pictures of the mind, recall

That table and the talk of youth,

Two girls in silk kimonos, both

Beautiful, one a gazelle.

The first quatrain presents itself as a stable form depicting the two girls at the great house of Lissadell in their youthful grace and ending with a full stop at quatrain’s end. However, the “But” opening the second quatrain signals a thematic change echoed by a formal one. From here on, the lives of the two girls go awry (at least, from the speaker’s perspective), as the mad overtones of the word “raving” suggest. They commit themselves to abstract political causes, and both they and the image of Ireland they project become “withered old and skeleton-gaunt, / An image of such politics.” Ireland, of course, is traditionally depicted as a woman (whether Cathleen ni Houlihan, the Shan Van Vocht, or another representation), and the first surviving draft of the poem applies the crone image to that country rather than to Eva and Con: “But Ireland is a hag,” it reads. The remaining seven lines of the first section shift attention to the speaker and his desire to visit the sisters, mix pictures of the mind, and above all to “speak”; its last two lines repeat the last two lines of the first quatrain verbatim. Not only does the sense reach a maximum tension with the expected divisions of rhyme, but the unusually late placement of the caesura before the end words “mix” and “recall” further destabilizes expected patterns. Notice, too, how the quatrains act out formally the notion of an opening gone awry that the poem presents biographically. After the first quatrain, no other stops at the end of a perfect four lines of rhyme. Instead, the poem continually itself goes awry against its quatrain form: the second one syntactically spills over into five lines, reaching an end stop only at the end of the fifth line with the important word “ignorant.” The rhyme scheme of the next quatrain begins with that line, but its syntax continues on through the first line of the next quatrain (“An image of such politics”) before reaching a new end stop.