Book 1, Thhe Complete Poetry of WB Yeats : Chapter 6, Winding Stairs to Parnell's Funeral Summary

This section includes the final poems from The Winding Stairs. The first poem is extremely short: Swift's Epitaph, it is 6 lines long. It consists of two alternating lines of rhyme and is completed by a rhyming couplet. After that, is a 3 stanza poem, each stanza holding 6 lines.

The midst of The Winding Stairs shows how some themes repeat themselves within the work. One of these is Byzantium; this is listed as poem # 260. Here the theme of conquest and of Empire reassert themselves.

The next poem is quite different, it is called The Mother of God. Of course, the poetry does not state this directly. After all, William Butler is certainly no Byzantine, although he writes about this extensively. The...