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The purpose of this paper is to examine the theme of W. B. Yeats’s Death of Cuchulain. Cuchualin had a more enduring influence on the poetry and plays of Yeats than any other Irish mythological subject. He was a symbol of the Irish Renaissance, an incarnation of all heroic ideals, and a kind of persona for the poet's own soul. Yeats’s most immediate source for his Cuchulain plays was Lady Gregory’s Cuchulain of Muirthemne, but he significantly altered the source to serve his purposes. In this paper, four major alterations in the source are traced, and the playwright’s ideas of the transformation are examined. Yeats’s alterations of the source make Yeats’s Cuchulain’s death less splendiferous than those of most epic heroes. By recognizing Emer’s vital role in his salvation at Baile’s Strand, by declining to kill Eithne Inguba, and by refusing to curse or plead with Aoife or the Blind Man, Cuchulain bypasses the hatreds and rashness that dragged Yeats’s earlier protagonists into purgatory. Although Cuchulain’s death ends the age of heroes, he dies bereft of hatred or trepidation. By changing his source, Yeats has made ‘forgiveness, mercy, unselfishness, and transcendence of the fear of death’, not martial feat nor victory nor revenge, his final virtue. To the dying Cuchulain, Yeats delegates the ultimate honor of proving that through forgiveness we may bypass both monomania in life and the ‘Dreaming-Back’ after life.