Thomas Osborne Davis
Edited by T. W. Rolleston
Whole text
- p.318
- Oh! weep those days, the penal days,
When Ireland hopelessly complained.
Oh! weep those days, the penal days,
When godless persecution reigned;
When year by year,
For serf and peer,
Fresh cruelties were made by law,
And filled with hate,
Our senate sate
To weld anew each fetter's flaw.
Oh! weep those days, those penal days—
Their memory still on Ireland weighs. - They bribed the flock, they bribed the son,
To sell the priest and rob the sire;
Their dogs were taught alike to run
Upon the scent of wolf and friar.
Among the poor,
Or on the moor, p.319
Were hid the pious and the true—
While traitor knave,
And recreant slave,
Had riches, rank, and retinue;
And, exiled in those penal days,
Our banners over Europe blaze. - A stranger held the land and tower
Of many a noble fugitive;
No Popish lord had lordly power,
The peasant scarce had leave to live;
Above his head
A ruined shed,
No tenure but a tyrant's will—
Forbid to plead,
Forbid to read
Disarmed, disfranchised, imbecile—
What wonder if our step betrays
The freedman, born in penal days? - They're gone, they're gone, those penal days!
All creeds are equal in our isle;
Then grant, O Lord, thy plenteous grace,
Our ancient feuds to reconcile.
Let all atone
For blood and groan,
For dark revenge and open wrong;
Let all unite
For Ireland's right,
And drown our griefs in freedom's song;
Till time shall veil in twilight haze,
The memory of those penal days.
The Penal Days
Air: The Wheelwright
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File description
Title statement
Title (uniform): The Penal Days
Author: Thomas Osborne Davis
Editor: T. W. Rolleston
Responsibility statement
Electronic edition compiled by: Beatrix Färber
Proof corrections by: Beatrix Färber and Olan Daly
Edition statement
1. First draft, revised and corrected.
Extent: 810 words
Publication statement
Publisher: CELT: Corpus of Electronic Texts: a project of University College Cork
Address: College Road, Cork, Ireland—http://www.ucc.ie/celt
Date: 2012
Distributor: CELT online at University College, Cork, Ireland.
CELT document ID: E850004-019
Availability: Available with prior consent of the CELT programme for purposes of academic research and teaching only.
Source description
Source
- First published in the Nation(?).
Other writings by Thomas Davis
- Thomas Davis, Essays Literary and Historical, ed. by D. J. O'Donoghue, Dundalk 1914.
- Sir Charles Gavan Duffy (ed.), Thomas Davis, the memoirs of an Irish patriot, 1840-1846. 1890. [Reprinted entitled 'Thomas Davis' with an introduction of Brendan Clifford. Millstreet, Aubane Historical Society, 2000.]
- Thomas Davis: selections from his prose and poetry. [Edited] with an introduction by T. W. Rolleston. London and Leipzig: T. Fisher Unwin (Every Irishman's Library). 1910. [Published in Dublin by the Talbot press, 1914.]
- Thomas Osborne Davis, Literary and historical essays 1846. Reprinted 1998, Washington, DC: Woodstock Books.
- Essays of Thomas Davis. New York, Lemma Pub. Corp. 1974, 1914 [Reprint of the 1914 ed. published by W. Tempest, Dundalk, Ireland, under the title 'Essays literary and historical'.]
- Thomas Davis: essays and poems, with a centenary memoir, 1845-1945. Dublin, M.H. Gill and Son, 1945. [Foreword by an Taoiseach, Éamon de Valera.]
- Angela Clifford, Godless colleges and mixed education in Ireland: extracts from speeches and writings of Thomas Wyse, Daniel O'Connell, Thomas Davis, Charles Gavan Duffy, Frank Hugh O'Donnell and others. Belfast: Athol, 1992.
Davis, Thomas Osborne (1910). ‘The Penal Days’. In: Thomas Davis: Selections from his prose and poetry. Ed. by T. W. Rolleston. 318—319. Dublin and London: The Talbot Press.
You can add this reference to your bibliographic database by copying or downloading the following:
@incollection{E850004-019,
author = {Thomas Osborne Davis},
title = {The Penal Days},
editor = {T. W. Rolleston},
booktitle = {Thomas Davis: Selections from his prose and poetry},
publisher = {The Talbot Press},
address = {Dublin and London},
date = {1910},
note = {318—319}
}
Encoding description
Project description: CELT: Corpus of Electronic Texts
Editorial declarations
Correction: Text has been proof-read twice and parsed.
Normalization: The electronic text represents the edited text.
Quotation: There is no direct speech.
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Segmentation: div0=the poem. Page-breaks are marked pb n="".
Standard values: Dates are standardized in the ISO form yyyy-mm-dd.
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Profile description
Creation: by Thomas Davis
Date: 1840s
Language usage
- The text is in English. (en)
Keywords: literary; poetry; 19c
Revision description
(Most recent first)
- 2012-05-08: Header created; file proofed (2), file parsed; SGML and HTML files created. (ed. Beatrix Färber)
- 2012-05-03: File proofed (1); basic structural markup applied. (ed. Olan Daly)
- 1996: Text captured by scanning. (ed. Audrey Murphy)