Thomas Osborne Davis
Edited by T. W. Rolleston
Whole text
- p.340
- We must not fail, we must not fail,
However fraud or force assail;
By honour, pride, and policy,
By Heaven itself!—we must be free. - Time had already thinned our chain,
Time would have dulled our sense of pain;
By service long, and suppliance vile,
We might have won our owner's smile. p.341 - We spurned the thought, our prison burst,
And dared the despot to the worst;
Renewed the strife of centuries,
And flung our banner to the breeze. - We called the ends of earth to view
The gallant deeds we swore to do;
They knew us wronged, they knew us brave,
And all we asked they freely gave. - We took the starving peasant's might
To aid in winning back his right,
We took the priceless trust of youth;
Their freedom must redeem our truth. - We promised loud, and boasted high,
"To break our country's chains, or die;"
And, should we quail, that country's name
Will be the synonym of shame. - Earth is not deep enough to hide
The coward slave who shrinks aside;
Hell is not hot enough to scathe
The ruffian wretch who breaks his faith. - But—calm, my soul!—we promised true
Her destined work our land shall do;
Thought, courage, patience will prevail!
We shall not fail—we shall not fail!
We Must not Fail
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Title statement
Title (uniform): We Must not Fail
Author: Thomas Osborne Davis
Editor: T. W. Rolleston
Responsibility statement
Electronic edition compiled by: Beatrix Färber
Proof corrections by: Beatrix Färber
Edition statement
1. First draft, revised and corrected.
Extent: 765 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: E850004-034
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). ‘We Must not Fail’. In: Thomas Davis: Selections from his prose and poetry. Ed. by T. W. Rolleston. Dublin and London: The Talbot Press, pp. 340–341.
You can add this reference to your bibliographic database by copying or downloading the following:
@incollection{E850004-034,
author = {Thomas Osborne Davis},
title = {We Must not Fail},
editor = {T. W. Rolleston},
booktitle = {Thomas Davis: Selections from his prose and poetry},
publisher = {The Talbot Press},
address = {Dublin and London},
date = {1910},
pages = {340–341}
}
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.
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="".
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)
- 2012-05-14: Header created; file proofed (1, 2), structural markup applied, file parsed; SGML and HTML files created. (ed. Beatrix Färber)
- 1996: Text captured by scanning. (ed. Audrey Murphy)