The Hour Glass

Abstract

The play first took shape in Yeats’s mind in 1902, and continued to nag at it off and on until 1922, when the two final versions, one in prose and the other in prose and verse, were published. It is based on a story, ‘The Priest’s Soul’, recorded by Lady Wilde in AL I, in which a priest, the cleverest in Ireland, denies the existence of the soul, of Heaven, of Purgatory and Hell. He is visited by an angel who tells him that he may either live on earth for a hundred years enjoying every pleasure and then be cast into Hell for ever, or die in twenty-four hours in the most horrible torments, and pass through Purgatory, there to remain till the Day of Judgement, unless he can find someone who believes, through whose mercy his soul can be saved. Finally he is saved by a child ‘from a far country’ who convinces him of the existence of the soul. The priest then retracts his blasphemy and bids the child kill him and call his pupils to watch his soul escaping, which becomes ‘the first butterfly that was ever seen in Ireland’.