The Unicorn from the Stars

This three-act play, written by W. B. Yeats with Lady Gregory, follows Martin Hearne, a young coachbuilder’s apprentice in the Irish countryside who falls into visionary trances. In one such trance he sees unicorns from the stars and wakes convinced he has been called to tear down the ordinary world and clear the way for a new spiritual order. His fervor pulls a band of beggars and wanderers into destruction, and the play weighs the fire of mystical vision against the ruin it can leave behind. Reworked from Yeats’s earlier Where There Is Nothing, it belongs to the Irish Literary Revival and the early years of the Abbey Theatre. First staged in 1908, it reads as both allegory and tragedy. This free PDF and EPUB edition includes the complete text.