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    The Hour-Glass (prose)
    The Hour-Glass (prose)
    The Hour-Glass (prose)
    Ebook20 pages22 minutes

    The Hour-Glass (prose)

    By W B Yeats

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    About this ebook

    William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was an instrumental figure in the "Irish Literary Revival" of the 20th Century that redefined Irish writing. His father's love of reading aloud exposed him early on to William Shakespeare, the Romantic poets and the pre-Raphaelites, and developed an interest in Irish myths and folklore. Yeats 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. He 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. His Morality play, "The Hour Glass", appeared on stage as early as 1902, and underwent many revisions by its final version in 1922. This edition contains the prose version of that play. The story presents a Fool, a Wise Man and an Angel who sort through questions of faith, doubt and the Wise Man's unrelenting rationalism. In this edition we have Yeats' prose version of the play.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDigireads.com Publishing
    Release dateJan 1, 2011
    ISBN9781420942286
    The Hour-Glass (prose)
    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 Hour-Glass (prose) - W B Yeats

      THE HOUR-GLASS

      (PROSE)

      A MORALITY

      BY W. B. YEATS

      A Digireads.com Book

      Digireads.com Publishing

      Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-4165-4

      Ebook ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-4228-6

      This edition copyright © 2011

      Please visit www.digireads.com

      CONTENTS

      PERSONS IN THE PLAY

      THE HOUR-GLASS

      PERSONS IN THE PLAY

      A WISE MAN

      A FOOL

      SOME PUPILS

      AN ANGEL

      THE WISE MAN'S WIFE AND TWO CHILDREN

      THE HOUR-GLASS

      [A large room with a door at the back and another at the side or else a curtained place where the persons can enter by parting the curtains. A desk and a chair at one side. An hour-glass on a stand near the door. A creepy stool near it. Some benches. A Wise Man sitting at his desk.]

      WISE MAN. [turning over the pages of a book]. Where is that passage I am to explain to my pupils to-day? Here it is, and the book says that it was written by a beggar on the walls of Babylon: There are two living countries, the one visible and the one invisible; and when it is winter with us it is summer in that country, and when the November winds are up among us it is lambing time there. I wish that my pupils had asked me to explain any other passage. [The Fool comes in and stands at the door holding out his hat. He has a pair of shears in the other hand.] It sounds to me like foolishness; and yet that cannot

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