Winding Up and Farewell: The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933) and After

This chapter examines the final phases and closure of the tower project. It focuses on the three tower-related poems collected in The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933), which effectively brings Yeats’s poetic investment in the building to an end. ‘Blood and the Moon’, the last tower poem Yeats wrote at Ballylee, represents the tower as an emblem of historical power, violence and thought. ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’, the third tower-oriented dialogue, was written shortly after Yeats left Ballylee as his summer residence, and it was through writing this sequence that the poet bade farewell to the tower, making the Self a soloist in the second part of the poem. With ‘Coole and Ballylee, 1931’, an ottava rima proleptic elegy for Lady Gregory and the place where Yeats’s tower project originated, Yeats finally combines the two places, completing and closing his tower period.