Mythologies
1893. This is a collection of Irish stories of the supernatural and uncanny, based on country beliefs, traditions and folk tales. Contents: The Celtic Twilight; The Secret Rose; Stories of Red Hanrahan; Rosa Alchemica; Tables of the Law; Adoration of the Magi; and Per Amica Silentia Lunae. This book is essential for all the readers of Yeats' poetry and plays. It reveals that Yeats could work unique enchantment in prose, as well as poetry.
Irish lore and legends
In this volume you get The Celtic Twilight (1893), 34 Irish stories about the supernatural, where little people, faeries, ghosts (some of them headless) abound; most of them have been collected from the people who remember this old lore, but a few of them, like A Voice, and The Old Town, are from Yeats' own experience.
The second part is The Secret Rose (1897), 9 legends that are perhaps my favorite section of this book, with stories like The Wisdom of the King, of a lonely hero who as a baby was given a "grey as the mist" drop of hawk crone blood, and whose hair was mixed with feathers.
Stories of Red Hanrahan (1897 and rewritten in 1907), is the life and death of a wandering poet, "the learned man and the great songmaker", which includes a number of poems.
Rosa Alchemica, Tables of the Law, and The Adoration of the Magi (1897) are on esoteric mysticism; glimpses into heaven and hell.
The final part is Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1917), essays on spiritualism, Christianity, poetry and its writers, and more.
Written with much beauty by the man many consider to be Ireland's greatest poet (and Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923), this unique collection of tales will enchant anyone interested in Irish history and its legends; legends which will, like the little creatures, last "until God shall burn up the world with a kiss". --Reviewer: Alejandra Vernon from Long Beach, California
