The Winding Stair and Other Poems pdf William Butler Yeats Free Download

Dulac had designed costumes, lighting, and a decorated cloth for the drama, as well as providing both music and masks along with playing the First Musician himself.

The Irish patriot and politician Kevin O’Higgins (1892–1927) served as vice-president, minister for economic affairs, and then minister for justice and external affairs in the first Irish Free State government. In apparent retaliation for diehard Republican executions, he was assassinated on his way to Mass. Poems pertinent to him include “Death,” “Blood and the Moon,” and “Parnell’s Funeral.” In late 1927 and early 1928 Yeats suffered from congestion of the lungs accompanied by serious bleeding.

IN MEMORY OF EVA GORE-BOOTH
AND CON MARKIEWICZ

First published in The Winding Stair (New York: Fountain Press, 1929).

Constance Markiewicz (née Gore-Booth, 1868–1927) and Eva Gore-Booth (1870–1926) were the two elder daughters of the Anglo-Irish landowning Gore-Booth family. Yeats first met them in 1894 and at one point thought of proposing to Eva.

1: Lissadell is the gray country mansion and former family seat of the Gore-Booths, a little outside the town of Sligo, where Yeats had many relatives on his mother’s side of the family. It was built in 1832 in late Georgian style. 4: In a prose memoir Yeats compares Eva to a gazelle. 7f: Con Markiewicz was sentenced to death for her part in the Easter Rising of 1916 (she served as deputy leader of the rebel contingent at Stephen’s Green in Dublin) but then reprieved; she remained active in hard-line Irish politics and worked among the poor in Dublin’s slums. Eva engaged in political activity, too, particularly promoting women’s rights and trade unions.

DEATH

First published in The Winding Stair (New York: Fountain Press, 1929).

In the dedication to Dulac, Yeats said that he was roused to write both this poem and “Blood and the Moon” by the assassination of Kevin O’Higgins, “the finest intellect in Irish public life.”

A DIALOGUE OF SELF AND SOUL

First published in The Winding Stair (New York: Fountain Press, 1929).

While preparing the Fountain Press volume, Yeats told Olivia Shakespear in a letter from October 1927, “I am writing a new tower poem ‘Sword and Tower,’ which is a choice of rebirth rather than deliverance from birth. I make my Japanese sword and its silk covering my symbol of life” (L 729). The tower was his own summer residence at Ballylee for which he named the preceding volume, The Tower (1928). He utilized it in several poems, including “Blood and the Moon.” The poem is written in eight-line stanzas, a unit favored by Yeats in his maturity but obscured for some readers by the frequent line turnovers of the display in this volume.

10: In 1920 his Japanese admirer Junzo Sato had presented Yeats with a ceremonial Japanese sword that had been in his family for more than five hundred years. 25: The sword maker Bishu Osafune Motoshige (or Montashigi) worked in the town of Osafune in the early fifteenth century.

BLOOD AND THE MOON

First published in The Exile (Spring 1928) and then in The Winding Stair (1929).

The poem begins with the speaker at Yeats’s tower, Thoor Ballylee near Gort in Galway, which has cottages at its base. In his “Notes” to the volume, Yeats wrote, “Part of the symbolism of ‘Blood and the Moon’ was suggested by the fact that Thoor Ballylee has a waste room at the top and that butterflies come in through the loopholes and die against the window-panes.”

13–14: The Pharos or lighthouse (ca. 280 B.C.) on the island of Pharos in the harbor at Alexandria was considered one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. The ancient Babylonians developed an advanced astronomy and astrology. 15–16: Yeats wrote in his essay “Prometheus Unbound” that the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) “shaped my life” (LE 121–22). Shelley used the phrase “thought’s crowned powers” in the ecstatic Chorus of Spirits in the fourth act of his visionary drama Prometheus Unbound, which in another essay Yeats called a “sacred book” (EE 51). 18f: All born in Ireland, the writer Oliver Goldsmith (1728–74), the writer and from 1713 dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), the philosopher and bishop George Berkeley (1685–1753), and the politician, orator, and aesthetician Edmund Burke (1729–97) represented to Yeats Irish eighteenth-century civilization at its best. 28: Yeats translated the Latin “Saeva Indignatio” as “savage indignation” in his version of “Swift’s Epitaph” later in the present volume.