Michael Robartes And The Dancer

W. B. Yeats's collection blends dramatic lyric, political elegy, mystical prose, and prophetic vision into a haunting meditation on love, history, and spiritual destiny. It opens with Yeats's own preface, then moves through exchanges such as "Michael Robartes and the Dancer" and "Solomon and the Witch," where beauty, intellect, sensuality, and the limits of knowledge are tested in symbolic dialogue. Other poems deepen the book's emotional range, from memory and longing to upheaval and loss. The collection's political center is Ireland's revolutionary crisis: "Easter, 1916," "Sixteen Dead Men," "The Rose Tree," and "On a Political Prisoner" confront sacrifice, grief, admiration, and the uneasy transformation of ordinary lives into history. Alongside these public poems, Yeats turns inward in works like "Towards Break of Day," "Demon and Beast," and "A Prayer for My Daughter," where childhood, desire, and tenderness are shadowed by uncertainty. The volume culminates in apocalyptic and philosophical force with "The Second Coming" and meditations on ceremony, custom, and endurance, while the Robartes prose pieces expand Yeats's occult system of dream, reincarnation, and the double gyre of history. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.