About: The Speckled Bird

The Speckled Bird is an autobiographical novel, by the Irish poet, writer, mystic and Nobel laureate in literature in 1923, W. B. Yeats. The novel has been written in four versions, between 1896 - 1903, and Yeats has given this name to the last version, taken from the Old Testament, Book of Jeremiah, chapter 12, verse 9: "Mine heritage is unto me as a speckled bird, the birds round about are against her; come ye, assemble all the beasts of the field, come to devour." The novel was never published during Yeats's lifetime. As referred to by Yeats himself when he wrote in his Autobiographies, in its chapter, The Trembling of the Veil: a novel that I could neither write nor cease to write, which had Hodos Chameliontos for its theme . The novel was published for the first time in 1976, includin