Thomas Osborne Davis
Edited by T. W. Rolleston
Whole text
- p.345
- FULL often when our fathers saw the Red above the Green,
They rose in rude but fierce array, with sabre, pike and scian,
And over many a noble town, and many a field of dead,
They proudly set the Irish Green above the English Red. - But in the end throughout the land, the shameful sight was seen—
The English Red in triumph high above the Irish Green;
But well they died in breach and field, who, as their spirits fled,
Still saw the Green maintain its place above the English Red. - And they who saw, in after times, the Red above the Green
Were withered as the grass that dies beneath a forest screen;
Yet often by this healthy hope their sinking hearts were fed,
That, in some day to come, the Green should flutter o'er the Red. - Sure 'twas for this Lord Edward died, and Wolfe Tone sunk serene—
Because they could not bear to leave the Red above the Green;
And 'twas for this that Owen fought, and Sarsfield nobly bled—
Because their eyes were hot to see the Green above the Red. p.346 - So when the strife began again, our darling Irish Green
Was down upon the earth, while high the English Red was seen;
Yet still we held our fearless course, for something in us said,
“Before the strife is o'er you'll see the Green above the Red.” - And 'tis for this we think and toil, and knowledge strive to glean,
That we may pull the English Red below the Irish Green,
And leave our sons sweet Liberty, and smiling plenty spread
Above the land once dark with blood—the Green above the Red! - The jealous English tyrant now has banned the Irish Green,
And forced us to conceal it like a something foul and mean;
But yet, by Heavens! he'll sooner raise his victims from the dead
Than force our hearts to leave the Green, and cotton to the Red. - We'll trust ourselves, for God is good, and blesses those who lean
On their brave hearts, and not upon an earthly king or queen;
And, freely as we lift out hands, we vow our blood to shed
Once and for evermore to raise the Green above the Red.
The Green above the Red
AIR—Irish Molly O!
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Title statement
Title (uniform): The Green above the Red
Author: Thomas Osborne Davis
Editor: T. W. Rolleston
Responsibility statement
Electronic edition compiled and proof corrections by: Beatrix Färber and Juliette Maffet
Edition statement
1. First draft, revised and corrected.
Extent: 970 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: E850004-027
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 on 12 October 1844.
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 Green above the Red’. In: Thomas Davis: Selections from his prose and poetry. Ed. by T. W. Rolleston. Dublin and London: The Talbot Press, pp. 345–346.
You can add this reference to your bibliographic database by copying or downloading the following:
@incollection{E850004-027,
author = {Thomas Osborne Davis},
title = {The Green above the Red},
editor = {T. W. Rolleston},
booktitle = {Thomas Davis: Selections from his prose and poetry},
publisher = {The Talbot Press},
address = {Dublin and London},
date = {1910},
pages = {345–346}
}
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: Direct speech is tagged q if nesting rules allow.
Hyphenation: Soft hyphens are silently removed. When a hyphenated word (and subsequent punctuation mark) crosses a page-break, this break is marked after the completion of the word (and punctuation mark).
Segmentation: div0=the poem. Page-breaks are marked pb n="". Italics of the printed edition are encoded emph rend="ital".
Standard values: Dates are standardized in the ISO form yyyy-mm-dd.
Interpretation: Names of persons, places or organisations are not tagged.
Profile description
Creation: by Thomas Davis
Date: 1844
Language usage
- The text is in English. (en)
- One word is in Irish. (ga)
Keywords: literary; poetry; 19c
Revision description
(Most recent first)
- 2012-02-28: File proofed (2), file parsed; SGML and HTML files created. (ed. Beatrix Färber)
- 2012-02-27: File proofed (1); header created; structural and content markup applied. (ed. Juliette Maffet)
- 1996: Text captured by scanning. (ed. Audrey Murphy)