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    The Unicorn from the Stars
    The Unicorn from the Stars
    The Unicorn from the Stars
    Ebook55 pages57 minutes

    The Unicorn from the Stars

    By W B Yeats

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    William Butler Yeats was born near Dublin in 1865, and was encouraged from a young age to pursue a life in the arts. He attended art school for a short while, but soon found that his talents and interest lay in poetry rather than painting. It can be difficult to characterize Yeats. He was a complicated man whose work reflected the internal struggle he felt between art and life. Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923, and received honorary degrees from Queen's University (Belfast), Trinity College (Dublin), and the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. In 1899 Yeats helped found the Irish National Theatre Society, which later became the famous Abbey Theatre of Dublin. There, he collaborated on several plays with Lady Augusta Gregory. One such play, "The Unicorn from the Stars", was first performed at the Abbey Theatre on November 23, 1907.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDigireads.com Publishing
    Release dateJan 1, 2011
    ISBN9781420942330
    The Unicorn from the Stars
    Author

    W B Yeats

    William Butler Yeats was born in 1865 in County Dublin. With his much-loved early poems such as 'The Stolen Child', and 'He Remembers Forgotten Beauty', he defined the Celtic Twilight mood of the late-Victorian period and led the Irish Literary Renaissance. Yet his style evolved constantly, and he is acknowledged as a major figure in literary modernism and twentieth-century European letters. T. S. Eliot described him as 'one of those few whose history is the history of their own time, who are part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them'. W. B. Yeats died in 1939.

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      Book preview

      The Unicorn from the Stars - W B Yeats

      THE UNICORN FROM THE STARS

      BY W. B. YEATS

      A Digireads.com Book

      Digireads.com Publishing

      Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-4172-2

      Ebook ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-4233-0

      This edition copyright © 2011

      Please visit www.digireads.com

      CONTENTS

      PERSONS IN THE PLAY

      ACT I

      ACT II

      ACT III

      PERSONS IN THE PLAY

      FATHER JOHN

      THOMAS HEARNE, a coach builder.

      ANDREW HEARNE, his brother.

      MARTIN HEARNE, his nephew.

      JOHNNY BACACH  }

      PAUDEEN  } beggars.

      BIDDY LALLY  }

      NANNY  }

      Period: early nineteenth century

      ACT I

      Interior of a coach builder's workshop. Parts of a gilded coach, among them an ornament representing the lion and the unicorn. Thomas working at a wheel. Father John coming from door of inner room.

      FATHER JOHN. I have prayed over Martin. I have prayed a long time, but there is no move in him yet.

      THOMAS. You are giving yourself too much trouble, Father. It's as good for you to leave him alone till the doctor's bottle will come. If there is any cure at all for what is on him, it is likely the doctor will have it.

      FATHER JOHN. I think it is not doctor's medicine will help him in this case.

      THOMAS. It will, it will. The doctor has his business learned well. If Andrew had gone to him the time I bade him, and had not turned again to bring yourself to the house, it is likely Martin would be walking at this time. I am loth to trouble you, Father, when the business is not of your own sort. Any doctor at all should be able, and well able, to cure the falling sickness.

      FATHER JOHN. It is not any common sickness that is on him now.

      THOMAS. I thought at the first it was gone asleep he was. But when shaking him and roaring at him failed to rouse him, I knew well it was the falling sickness. Believe me, the doctor will reach it with his drugs.

      FATHER JOHN. Nothing but prayer can reach a soul that is so far beyond the world as his soul is at this moment.

      THOMAS. You are not saying that the life is gone out of him!

      FATHER JOHN. No, no, his life is in no danger. But where he himself, the spirit, the soul, is gone, I cannot say. It has gone beyond our imaginings. He is fallen into a trance.

      THOMAS. He used to be queer as a child, going asleep in the fields and coming back with talk of white horses he saw, and bright people like angels or whatever they were. But I mended that. I taught him to recognise stones beyond angels with a few strokes of a rod. I would never give in to visions or to trances.

      FATHER JOHN. We who hold the faith have no right to speak against trance or vision. St. Teresa had them, St. Benedict, St. Anthony, St. Columcille. St. Catherine of Sienna often lay a long time as if dead.

      THOMAS. That might be so in the olden time, but those things are gone out of the world now. Those that do their work fair and honest have no occasion to let the mind go rambling. What would send my nephew, Martin Hearne, into a trance, supposing trances to be in it, and he rubbing the gold on the lion and unicorn that he had taken in hand to make a good job of for the top of the coach?

      FATHER JOHN. [taking it up] It is likely it was that sent him off. The flashing of light upon it would be enough to throw one that had a disposition to it into a trance. There was a very saintly man, though he was not of our church, he wrote a great book called Mysterium Magnum, was seven days in a trance. Truth, or whatever truth he found, fell upon him like a bursting shower, and he a poor tradesman at his work. It was a ray of sunlight on a pewter vessel that was the beginning of all. [Goes to the door of inner room.] There is no stir in him yet. It is either the best thing or the worst thing can happen to anyone that is happening to him now.

      THOMAS. And what in the living world can happen to a man that is asleep on his bed?

      FATHER JOHN. There are some would answer you that it is to those who are awake that nothing happens, and it is they that know nothing. He is gone where all have gone for supreme truth.

      THOMAS. [sitting down again and taking up tools] Well, maybe so. But work must go on and coach

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