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    At the Hawk's Well
    At the Hawk's Well
    At the Hawk's Well
    Ebook17 pages15 minutes

    At the Hawk's Well

    By W B Yeats

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    About this ebook

    Born and educated in Dublin, Ireland, William Butler Yeats discovered early in his literary career a fascination with Irish folklore and the occult. He was a complex man, who struggled between beliefs in the strange and supernatural, and scorn for modern science. He was intrigued by the idea of mysticism, yet had little regard for Christianity. His close friend, Ezra Pound, exposed Yeats to the symbolic theatre genre of Japanese Noh drama, prompting him to write "At the Hawk's Well" in 1916. The play, based on the Cuchulain legends of Irish mythology, uses Japanese-style masks and very simple sets to achieve an abstract, stylized form. The story is set by a dried up well on a barren mountainside, guarded constantly by a hawk-woman, and watched diligently by an old man who has waited fifty years to drink from its miraculous waters and the young Cuchulain who fails to heed the old man's warnings.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDigireads.com Publishing
    Release dateJan 1, 2011
    ISBN9781420942200
    At the Hawk's Well
    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

      At the Hawk's Well - W B Yeats

      AT THE HAWK'S WELL

      BY W. B. YEATS

      A Digireads.com Book

      Digireads.com Publishing

      Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-4155-5

      Ebook ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-4220-0

      This edition copyright © 2011

      Please visit www.digireads.com

      CONTENTS

      PERSONS OF THE PLAY

      AT THE HAWK'S WELL

      PERSONS OF THE PLAY

      Three Musicians [their faces made up to resemble masks]

      The Guardian of the Well [with face made up to resemble a mask]

      An Old Man [wearing a mask]

      A Young Man [wearing a mask]

      AT THE HAWK'S WELL

      The Time—the Irish Heroic Age.

      The stage is any bare space before a wall against which stands a patterned screen. A drum and a gong and a zither have been laid close to the screen before the play begins. If necessary, they can be carried in, after the audience is seated, by the First Musician, who also can attend to the lights if there is any special lighting. We had two lanterns upon posts—designed

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