These stories center on schoolmaster Red Hanrahan and his supernatural experiences. Additional tales include 'The Secret Rose' and 'Rosa Alchemica', featuring Yeats' personal interpretations of celtic mythology and occult legends.

Few have lived their ideas so passionately and nobly as W. B. Yeats in his love affairs, politics and poetry. From his youth in the 1880s, a fertile dreamer rediscovering and remaking the Irish tradition, he grew into a great and innovative poet of the twentieth century. This selection includes the final book from the unjustly neglected narrative poem The Wanderings of Oisin and a number of lyrics from Yeats's work as poetic dramatist. This edition breaks new ground in presenting alternative versions of a dozen poems and a number of significant variants. It also includes explanatory and textual notes for each poem.

From the publication of his first poems at the age of twenty, to his Nobel Prize in 1923, W. B. Yeats grew from an aspiring poet spellbound by the mystical life, to an Irish senator crafting modernist poetry around a complex system of symbolism. When You are Old: Early Poems and Fairy Tales returns to the younger Yeats, encountering him through Irish mythology and much-beloved poems like "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" and "He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven" that made him popular during his own lifetime. The poems, plays, and prose collected here present Yeats as the 1890s aesthete who dressed as a dandy, collected Irish folklore, dabbled in magic, and wrote beautiful poems for his beloved, steeped in the late-Victorian aesthetics of the symbolist and decadence movements, as well as early modernism. Approaching his early verse and tales with innocent candor as if reading Yeats for the first time, this volume proffers lush images of western Ireland full of faeries and otherworldly beings, framed within a profound fascination with aestheticism and the Arts and Crafts Movement, all giving expression to Yeats's early nationalist sympathies.