I find it particularly interesting to be going back in depth with Yeats’ work from The Winding Stair while also reading his later works that seem so different from one another. A common theme in poems like “Vacillation” and “A Dialogue of Self and Soul” is this confidence where Yeats grapples between the soul and the body, but ultimately relies on the body as his final conclusion. The arrogance with which Yeats proclaims that he will continue to create despite the possibility of transcendence beyond the physical world. However, when looking at Yeats’ later poetry, as he grows more ill, his confidence fades, and the subject of his work shifts to one of uncertainty and disappointment, where Yeats falls to the type of old age that part V of “Vacillation” addresses, “Things said or done long years ago, / Or things I did not do or say / But thought that I might say or do / Weigh me down” (51-54). This attitude of never having done enough becomes the typical message of Yeats’ later work, where he as a writer becomes the image that his past self so accurately portrayed.