Last Poems & Plays by William Butler Yeats, published in 1940 by Macmillan, is the final collection released during the poet’s lifetime, appearing the year after his death in January 1939. The volume gathers the fierce, spare, and visionary work of Yeats’s astonishing late period, when age and approaching death freed him from the ornate Celtic twilight style of his youth and propelled him toward a stark, rhythmic language of naked confrontation.
The book opens with the sequence “Last Poems,” written between 1936 and 1939. Here the reader encounters a poet no longer interested in consolation. In “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” Yeats famously surveys his own imaginative life—mythology, love poetry, nationalist fervor—and finds them all mere “masterful images” that have finally abandoned him, leaving only the raw, unpoetic materials of his broken heart. In “Lapis Lazuli,” he contemplates catastrophe (the Spanish Civil War, the approaching world war) and offers the strange, aristocratic consolation that tragic joy is the highest human achievement: “All things fall and are built again, / And those that build them again are gay.” Other poems address his lust for the young, his terror of bodily decrepitude, his obsessive interest in occult systems, and his defiant refusal of Christian afterlife.
The second section of the book, “Last Plays,” includes his final dramatic works for the Abbey Theatre, most notably The Death of Cuchulain and Purgatory. These stark one-act plays strip away the elaborate staging of his earlier theater, reducing action to a few figures on a bare stage confronting the ghosts of history and family violence. Purgatory, in particular, is a brutal, despairing work—a bitter old man and his son stand before a ruined house, reenacting the murder and lust that begot them, trapped in an endless cycle of inherited sin from which only fire can release them.
The volume closes with Yeats’s explosive “Politics,” a short poem that offers no resolution but only a defiant, almost pathetic human gesture—”I would have told her that I loved her”—against the “fury and the mire of human veins.” Last Poems & Plays is not a gentle farewell. It is a clenched fist, a cracked voice singing in the dark, and one of the most powerful final statements in English letters.