Calvary

William Butler Yeats's close friend, Ezra Pound, exposed the playwright to the symbolic theatre genre of Japanese Noh drama, prompting him to write a series of four plays in that style. The final play in this series, which were first printed together in "Four Plays for Dancers", was "Calvary". With Ireland in the midst of a hunger-strike, the story of the self-sacrificing Christ was particularly relevant. In the story, Christ dreams of his passion, only to find that he is still rejected and is essentially alone, as so many heroic figures must find themselves.