The epitome of symbolist drama. "Count Villiers de I'lsle-Adam", wrote Yeats, "swept together words behind which glimmered a spiritual and passionate mood, as the flame glimmers behind the dusky blue and red glass in an Eastern lamp". Paralleling the author's own metaphysical studies (which moved from occultism to more orthodox idealisms and back to Catholicism), these positions were examined by his characters. Each is rejected, and it is with the dramatic discovery of the highest ideal that the work ends.