The Unicorn from the Stars and Other Plays
Yeats's mystical one-act plays stage the collision between the ordinary world and the realm of spirit. In "The Unicorn from the Stars," a coach builder's workshop becomes sacred ground where Father John and Thomas Hearne argue over young Martin Hearne, nephew to Thomas, who lies in an unexplained trance. Is the boy mad, divinely touched, or simply seeing what practical men cannot? The play pulses with Yeats's fascination with the borderlands of consciousness, his brother Jack's own visionary episode feeding the drama's raw autobiographical core. Across these early theatrical works, Yeats weaves Irish folklore, Theosophical wonder, and the tension between artistic vision and societal expectations into something that feels less like conventional drama and more like ritual. The language has the quality of incantation. These are plays for readers who prefer their theater haunted, ambiguous, and unafraid of mystery.
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“I saw nothing and heard nothing; near dead I am with a fright I got and with the hardship of the goal.Once men fought with their desires and their fears, with all that they call their sins, unhelped, and their souls became hard and strong. When we have brought back the clean earth and destroyed the law and the church, all life will become like a flame of fire, like a burning eye... Oh, how to find words, for it all... all that is not life will pass away!No man can be alive, and what is paradise but fullness of life, if whatever he sets his hand to in the daylight cannot carry him from exaltation to exaltation, and if he does not rise into the frenzy of contemplation in the night silence. Events that are not begotten in joy are misbegotten and darken the world, and nothing is begotten in joy if the joy of a thousand years has not been crushed into a moment.The soul of man is of the imperishable substance of the stars!The day you go to heaven that you may never come back again alive out of it! But it is not yourself will never hear the saints hammering at their music! It is you will be moving through the ages chains upon you, and you in the form of a dog or a monster! I tell you, that one will go through purgatory as quick as lightning through a thorn bush.It is very queer the world itself is, whatever shape was put upon it at the first!””
— W. B. Yeats
“The soul of man is of the imperishable substance of the stars!””
— W. B. Yeats
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Yeats, W. B.. The Unicorn from the Stars and Other Plays. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-unicorn-from-the-stars-and-other-plays-08519aae-d7dc-4c7b-a26b-c2e6d4e058f1.Yeats, W. B. (n.d.). The Unicorn from the Stars and Other Plays. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-unicorn-from-the-stars-and-other-plays-08519aae-d7dc-4c7b-a26b-c2e6d4e058f1Yeats, W. B.. The Unicorn from the Stars and Other Plays. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-unicorn-from-the-stars-and-other-plays-08519aae-d7dc-4c7b-a26b-c2e6d4e058f1.
