BL. W. B. Yeats

35. Wheels and Butterflies. London: Macmillan, 1934.

Reprints The Cat and the Moon (24a), the later version of The Resurrection (28), and The Words Upon the Window Pane (34).

a. Fighting the Waves. A prose version of The Only Jealousy of Emer (14b) revised for performance at the Abbey Theatre, where it was first performed on 13 August 1929. Miller (185) suggests the revision was ‘perhaps . . . prompted’ by the version of Atsumori in Waley’s Nô Plays of Japan (D26b), and that the work ‘marked the end of Yeats’s attempt to write in a form very closely modelled on the nô’. See also 36a-b. Reprinted in 51.

b. Introduction to The Resurrection. Includes Yeats’s only published reference to Hearn (see D9): ‘All ancient nations believed in the re-birth of the soul and had probably empirical evidence like that Lafcadio Hearn found among the Japanese’. Reprinted in 51.

c. Introduction to The Cat and the Moon. Equates the thought of ‘the Japanese labour leader and Christian saint Kagawa [Toyohiko, see 46c] . . . [who] speaks of that early phase of every civilisation where a man must follow his father’s occupation, where everything is prescribed, as buried under dream and myth’, with Ireland, for ‘the Irish country people kept something of that early period’, and for this reason, Yeats says, he wrote his Celtic Twilights and annotated Lady Gregory’s Visions and Beliefs (see 15). Unlike notes to the play that appeared with its original publication (24b), this introduction does not mention kyôgen, though Yeats does note that he ‘wanted some light entertainment to join a couple of the dance plays or The Resurrection [28] and a dance play’. Reprinted in 51.

	The three works noted are reprinted in Explorations.