Beautiful early writings by one of the 20th century’s greatest poets on the 150th anniversary of his birth A Penguin Classic The poems, prose, and drama gathered in When You Are Old present a fresh portrait of the Nobel Prize–winning writer as a younger man: the 1890s aesthete who dressed as a dandy, collected Irish folklore, dabbled in magic, and wrote heartrending poems for his beloved, the beautiful, elusive Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne. Included here are such celebrated, lyrical poems as “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” and “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven,” as well as Yeats’s imaginative retellings of Irish fairytales—including his first major poem, “The Wanderings of Oisin,” based on a Celtic fable—and his critical writings, which offer a fascinating window onto his artistic theories. Through these enchanting works, readers will encounter Yeats as the mystical, lovelorn bard and Irish nationalist popular during his own lifetime. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Poetry.

Crossways - The rose - The wind among the the reeds - In the seven woods - The green helmet and other poems - Responsibilities - The wild swans at Coole - Michael Robartes and the dancer - The tower - The winding stair and other poems - Words for music perhaps - A woman young and old - A full moon in March - Last poems.

First published in 1891, John Sherman and Dhoya was Yeats's third separate publication. The stories were revised and reprinted in the 1908 Collected Works in Verse and Prose but not published again in Yeats's lifetime. John Sherman, Yeats's only completed attempt at realistic fiction, details the title character's dilemma: He must choose between life in London and marriage to Margaret Leland, an English girl, and life in Ireland and marriage to a childhood sweetheart, Mary Carton. In addition to containing numerous autobiographical elements (for instance, the town of Ballah is modeled on Yeats's Sligo), the novelette treats many of Yeats's persistent themes, such as the debate between nationality and cosmopolitanism and the conflict between what he would later call the Self and the Anti-Self. In the end, Sherman reaffirms his Irish roots, and Margaret Leland's affections are transferred to Sherman's friend, the Reverend William Howard. Dhoya, a mythological tale set in the remote past, depicts a liasion between a mortal and a fairy, a motif that Yeats used in many other works. Describing the inevitable conflict between a world of perfection and the mortal world, the short story suggests that "only the changing, and moody, and angry, and weary can love." Well received by most contemporary reviewers, John Sherman and Dhoya are important both as works of fiction and as indications of the fundamental continuity of subject and theme in Yeats's career. This edition offers an accurate text, an introduction, and explanatory notes.

Here is the complete, standard edition of the verse of Ireland's greatest lyric poet, including poems from Yeats's plays and essays--edited by internationally acclaimed Yeats scholar Richard J. Finneran. This top-selling reference has been steadily in demand since its original publication in 1989. Index.

I At the end of the ’eighties my father and mother, my brother and sisters and myself, all newly arrived from Dublin, were settled in Bedford Park in a red-brick house with several mantelpieces of wood, copied from marble mantelpieces designed by the brothers Adam, a balcony and a little garden shadowed by a great horse-chestnut tree. Years before we had lived there, when the crooked ostentatiously picturesque streets with great trees casting great shadows had been a new enthusiasm: the Pre-Raphaelite movement at last affecting life. But now exaggerated criticism had taken the place of enthusiasm, the tiled roofs, the first in modern London, were said to leak, which they did not, and the drains to be bad, though that was no longer true; and I imagine that houses were cheap. I remember feeling disappointed because the co-operative stores, with their little seventeenth century panes, had lost the romance they had when I had passed them still unfinished on my way to school; and because the public house, called The Tabard after Chaucer’s Inn, was so plainly a common public house; and because the great sign of a trumpeter designed by Rooke, the Pre-Raphaelite artist, had been freshened by some inferior hand. The big red-brick church had never pleased me, and I was accustomed, when I saw the wooden balustrade that ran along the slanting edge of the roof where nobody ever walked or could walk, to remember the opinion of some architect friend of my father’s, that it had been put there to keep the birds from falling off. Still, however, it had some village characters and helped us to feel not wholly lost in the metropolis. I no longer went to church as a regular habit, but go I sometimes did, for one Sunday morning I saw these words painted on a board in the porch: “The congregation are requested to kneel during prayers; the kneelers are afterwards to be hung upon pegs provided for the purpose.” In front of every seat hung a little cushion and these cushions were called “kneelers.” Presently the joke ran through the community, where there were many artists who considered religion at best an unimportant accessory to good architecture and who disliked that particular church.