The Winding Stair and Other Poems, by W. B. Yeats (Macmillan)

Those admirers of Yeats who found Words for Music Perhaps disappointing will not find this new and larger collection, which includes the earlier, less so. One had, of course, no right to set the standard of one's expectations by The Tower, but, naturally, one did.

The present book, in theme and general tone, bears a close relation to The Tower, but contains nothing as good as the best of that. The proud sardonic tension—it would be marvellous if it were otherwise— is slackened. It is with a different irony that Yeats here, in Byiantium, which corresponds to the Sailing to Byzantium of The Tower, contemplates the ‘artifice of eternity’:

Soul, though still studying ‘monuments of its own magnificence’, hardly now ‘claps its hands and sings’; what was an astringency in the exaltation is now a sterile bitterness—the‘miracle’ is itself ‘embittered’:

The world of sense, the pride and beauty of life, so potently present in Sailing to Byzantium, are now merely (though there is a ‘dolphin’) ‘complexities of mire and blood’, and spirit, ‘blood-begotten’, that would escape the ‘complexities’, is seen striving in tortured impotence,