The Secret Rose

William Butler Yeats

This collection of short stories by William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), a leader of the Irish literary revival, a Nobel laureate, includes his works, inspired by Irish beliefs and legends, the teachings of the Rosicrucians and other mystical doctrines. The central subject of these narratives, whose chronology extends from pre-Christian times to the author’s days, is the unremitting war of spiritual with natural order. Protagonists of the book — poets and lovers, monks and men of learning, the knights of St. John and members of the Order of the Alchemical Rose — serve sacrificially an elusive ideal, embodied in the mystical image of the rose whose petals show between them now timeless vision of spiritual beauty, now infinitely dear face of a beloved woman, now Ireland’s eternal soul…