Collection: The Winding Stair and Other Poems

Overview
Published in 1933, The Winding Stair and Other Poems gathers W. B. Yeats’s late work into a concentrated book of meditations on aging, art, desire, violence, and spiritual striving. It is a companion in mood and ambition to The Tower, yet it turns inward more starkly, returning to the stone tower at Thoor Ballylee with its actual winding stair as emblem for ascent and descent through mind, memory, and soul. Across incantatory lyrics and knotty meditative sequences, Yeats wrestles with irreconcilable opposites, body and spirit, passion and renunciation, order and anarchy, history’s blood and art’s stillness, seeking a hard-won poise rather than any final resolution.

Structure and Contents
The volume brings together poems written between 1929 and 1933, including revised pieces first issued in the slimmer 1929 pamphlet The Winding Stair and lyrics from the contemporaneous Words for Music Perhaps. It juxtaposes long, argumentative set-pieces with compact dramatic monologues and songlike lyrics. Central are A Dialogue of Self and Soul, a stylized debate staged on the tower stair; Byzantium, an answering vision to the earlier Sailing to Byzantium; Vacillation, a multi-part poem of oscillating moods and metaphysical trial; and Blood and the Moon, a tower poem where purity and violence clash under the moon’s indifferent light. Interspersed are the Crazy Jane songs and other brief lyrics that test large ideas through earthy speech and theatrical masks.

Themes
Yeats’s late metaphysics, shaped by the system of cyclical history he called the gyres, saturates the book, yet the poems remain sensuously particular. The stair coils through images of return and recurrence, as thought climbs toward spiritual clarity only to be drawn down by memory, lust, or rage. Old age intensifies rather than dims appetite; the flesh will not yield to sermon. At the same time, art beckons as an artifice of eternity: metalwork, mosaic, and chant promise a permanence beyond decay, yet the poems distrust any disembodied serenity that forgets blood and laughter. Ireland’s troubles flicker at the margins in scenes of broken glass and desecration, but the political temper is transmuted into universal dilemmas of order and chaos. The book’s many masks, holy sage, bawd, courtier, ascetic, let Yeats test contrary truths without collapsing them into a single creed.

Key Poems and Motifs
A Dialogue of Self and Soul stages an inward duel in which discipline, purity, and escape from rebirth contend with the reckless embrace of lived experience. The poem’s turning spiral shows that progress is not a straight climb but a repeated return at a different pitch. Byzantium imagines a perfected city of hammered gold and ritual flame, where spirits are forged and purified; it both completes and complicates the earlier vision by making transcendence stranger, more violent, and more ceremonial. Vacillation dramatizes the mind’s alternation between ecstasy and gloom, renunciation and indulgence, testing each stance to its limit. Blood and the Moon sets the moon’s cold perfection against the tower stained by human action, refusing to forget the cost of earthly greatness. The Crazy Jane sequence, with its bawdy wit and defiant piety, insists that wisdom is learned in the body and the world’s dirt, not merely in austere doctrine.

Style and Voice
The diction is pared and metallic, the music hammered rather than lilted, full of gnomic turns, ritual repetitions, and lapidary statements. Yeats fuses high symbol and folk idiom, letting coarse speech jar against liturgical cadence. Stanzas often move in steps, revisiting propositions with incremental shifts, like feet feeling their way up a spiral stair. The imagery is exact and emblematic, moon, tower, sword, fire, mosaic, bird, dancer, objects that suggest both tangible surface and metaphysical depth.

Significance
The Winding Stair and Other Poems consolidates Yeats’s late style and his lifelong argument with himself. It is a book of spiritual severity that refuses to deny the body, a book of art’s immortality that keeps an eye on mortal blood. Its power lies in holding contraries in tense equilibrium, turning the poet’s private symbols into public emblems of modern consciousness.