In this richly personal, visionary drama, W. B. Yeats traces how Irish songs, folklore, and the influence of Lady Gregory shaped his art, then turns that inspiration into a play of rebellion, class tension, and strange freedom. In the world of magistrates, tinkers, friars, and country folk, Paul Ruttledge—a landowner restless with privilege—begins by clipping hedges into farmyard shapes and speaking in unsettling parables, revealing his disgust with respectability and his hunger for a life beyond convention. Drawn to the roads, he swaps clothes with a tinker, abandons his home, and joins the wandering people in a defiant search for laughter, music, and elemental truth. He courts Sabina Silver among them, plans a feast of free porter for the neighborhood, and revels in the comic, uneasy joy of his new life. But as the revelry spreads, local authorities and his own family arrive to restore order. Paul answers with satire and moral challenge, mocking property, religion, and duty before seizing control in a mock trial that exposes the hypocrisy of the comfortable class and the fierce, unsettling power of his revolt. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.