Project Gutenberg's The Wild Swans at Coole, by William Butler (W.B.) Yeats

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Title: The Wild Swans at Coole

Author: William Butler (W.B.) Yeats

Release Date: May 23, 2010 [EBook #32491]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE WILD SWANS AT COOLE

[Illustration]

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK - BOSTON - CHICAGO - DALLAS
ATLANTA - SAN FRANCISCO

MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED
LONDON - BOMBAY - CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
TORONTO

THE WILD SWANS
AT COOLE

BY

W. B. YEATS

New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1919

_All rights reserved_

COPYRIGHT, 1917 AND 1918,
BY MARGARET C. ANDERSON.

COPYRIGHT, 1918,
BY HARRIET MONROE.

COPYRIGHT, 1918 AND 1919,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published March, 1919.

Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

PREFACE

This book is, in part, a reprint of _The Wild Swans at Coole_, printed a
year ago on my sister's hand-press at Dundrum, Co. Dublin. I have not,
however, reprinted a play which may be a part of a book of new plays
suggested by the dance plays of Japan, and I have added a number of new
poems. Michael Robartes and John Aherne, whose names occur in one or
other of these, are characters in some stories I wrote years ago, who
have once again become a part of the phantasmagoria through which I can
alone express my convictions about the world. I have the fancy that I
read the name John Aherne among those of men prosecuted for making a
disturbance at the first production of "The Play Boy," which may account
for his animosity to myself.

W. B. Y.

BALLYLEE, CO. GALWAY,
_September 1918_.

CONTENTS

PAGE

THE WILD SWANS AT COOLE 1

IN MEMORY OF MAJOR ROBERT GREGORY 4

AN IRISH AIRMAN FORESEES H