Following that, the last seven lines all run into each other until the word “gazelle” ending line 20 and the first section of the poem. In one of Yeats’s continual and amazing feats of versecraft, then, his manipulation of the verse acts out formally the thematic notion expressed in the lines semantically.

The second section focuses even more on the speaker. The sisters have now become “dear shadows” because they have recently passed away and so freed themselves from their great enemy, time, which in the speaker’s view so disfigured them. In temporary despair, he imagines striking a match to burn up and so purify things of this world. Significantly, as he does so often—and it’s a part of Yeats that makes me sometimes trust and even love him—Yeats includes himself among the misguided. “We the great gazebo built,” he declares in abolition of a distinction between himself and the sisters on this point. Not just they but also he went astray; indeed, the manuscript draft puts it even more strongly: “I the great gazebo built,” it reads, with Yeats’s always shaky spelling rendering “gazebo” as “gazabo,” suggesting that he pronounced it gaz-a-bo. A gazebo, of course, can be a summer structure in a yard or garden, a place to look from, and also in Anglo-Irish usage can refer to making yourself into a gazebo or object of ridicule. And nowadays one cannot avoid thinking of the contemporary poet Paul Muldoon’s delicious parody in “7, Middagh Street,” “Two girls, both beautiful, one a gazebo.” In any case, it humanizes Yeats to see his most stringent criticism directed at himself rather than at others. That fire kindled at the end of “In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz” runs not only through time but through the rest of the volume, including the fires of “Byzantium” and the “brand, or flaming breath” and tree that is half flame of “Vacillation.” I pause next over the three Coole Park poems in the middle of the volume (if we exempt the two final sequences), and particularly over “Coole Park, 1929,” in relation to the overall design of this book.

Coole Park was the home of Lady Gregory, Yeats’s patron and friend. Lack of funds had forced her to sell it to the government in 1927, while she lived on there as tenant until her death in 1932, the year before The Winding Stair and Other Poems was published. In contrast to the Gore-Booth girls of the opening poem, here was a woman who brought out the best in her own heritage, again associated with a house that she fought to preserve (she was inevitably defeated, and the materials scandalously sold for scrap after her death, but at least she fought). Further, she succeeded in embodying her ideal in history and the actual world. Significantly, the poem is entitled “Coole Park, 1929” but could just as easily be called “Lady Gregory, 1929.” Fond as he was of eight-line stanzas in his maturity, Yeats chose here ottava rima, an octave borrowed from the Italian and rhyming abababcc in iambic pentameter. Most famously used in English as the comic stanza of Byron’s Don Juan, which rhymed “Aristotle” with “bottle,” for example, Yeats turned it to serious purposes and his powerful mature syntax. He did that partly by his characteristic device of making syntax and stanza coincide. Looking back to his romantic roots, he explained in “A General Introduction for My Work,” “I discovered some twenty years ago that I must seek, not as Wordsworth thought, words in common use, but a powerful and passionate syntax, and a complete coincidence between period and stanza” (LE 212). Notice how that works in the first stanza, where the poet meditates the evening landscape at Coole in a stanza consisting of a single sentence:

I meditate upon a swallow’s flight,

Upon an aged woman and her house,

A sycamore and lime tree lost in night

Although that western cloud is luminous,

Great works constructed there in nature’s spite

For scholars and for poets after us,

Thoughts long knitted into a single thought,

A dance-like glory that those walls begot.

The aged woman is, of course, Lady Gregory, and the western cloud is luminous as both she and Coole Park are at the end of their lives. Yeats loved the maxim “Art is art because it is not nature” (which he misattributed to Goethe, EE 371) and used it to describe Lady Gregory’s achievement. She had made Coole a cultural and artistic center, enabling great works to be constructed there both to spite nature and in spite of nature. The stanza closes with one of Yeats’s characteristic images of Unity of Being, the dance, as does “Among School Children” in the previous volume.

The middle two stanzas of the poem shift to past tense as Yeats first invokes for a stanza five of those who labored at Coole and then devotes the entire following stanza to Lady Gregory herself. The five are Douglas Hyde (president of the Gaelic League and later of Ireland), Yeats himself as “one that ruffled in a manly pose,” the playwright John Synge, and Lady Gregory’s two nephews—the nationalist John Shawe-Taylor who, retiring after the Boer War, devoted himself particularly to land reform, and the art critic, dealer, and administrator Hugh Lane who, in a controversial gesture, left his valuable collection to the city of Dublin if it would build an art gallery to house it (you can see the collection there to this day). Yeats sees Lady Gregory as not only organizing the five into formation, but creating a pattern that seemed to “whirl,” a word that evokes both Yeats’s historical gyres and the “winding” stair of the volume’s title. Thanks to that, Coole becomes an opposing image to the Gore-Booths and to the gazebo that drove the poet to despair in the book’s opening poem.

With the fourth and final stanza, Yeats shifts mental gears again. This time he neither contemplates a present Coole nor remembers a past one but instead returns briefly to the present for a line and then imagines a future Coole:

Here, traveller, scholar, poet, take your stand

When all those rooms and passages are gone,

When nettles wave upon a shapeless mound

And saplings root among the broken stone,

And dedicate—eyes bent upon the ground,

Back turned upon the brightness of the sun

And all the sensuality of the shade—

A moment’s memory to that laurelled head.

He foresees a ruined Coole, such as shortly came to pass, which is why we cannot visit the house today, though we can visit the surviving site and woods. Yeats urges us to “take your stand” like soldiers and to honor Lady Gregory. The image combines his customary opposites, or “antinomies” as he called them, in this case especially sun and shade. The intensity of the emotion nearly breaks the ottava rima, as the syntax runs on from the final b rhyme into the first line of the couplet, resulting in the second line of the concluding couplet (the one that invokes Lady Gregory) seeming to stand alone. But besides its ottava rima form, the poem has a second one, closely linked to Romanticism. Its mental action, from meditating a present landscape to remembering or imagining a past or future one (Yeats does both here) and returning to the present, follows the structure of a greater Romantic lyric, a form invented by Wordsworth and Coleridge in poems like “Tintern Abbey,” “Frost at Midnight,” or “The Aeolian Harp” but also practiced by the second generation of Romantic poets, especially Keats in famous lyrics such as “Ode to a Nightingale” or (with artwork substituted for landscape) “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” In that way, the poem itself enacts its own homage to Coole Park, displaying the sort of imaginative power and patterning that Lady Gregory had inspired there and that the poem itself represents.