William Butler Yeats
Whole text
- p.32
- Fergus
This whole day have I followed in the rocks,
And you have changed and flowed from shape to shape,
First as a raven on whose ancient wings
Scarcely a feather lingered, then you seemed
A weasel moving on from stone to stone,
And now at last you wear a human shape,
A thin grey man half lost in gathering night.- Druid
What would you, king of the proud Red Branch kings?- Fergus
This would I say, most wise of living souls:
Young subtle Conchubar sat close by me
When I gave judgment, and his words were wise,
And what to me was burden without end,
To him seemed easy, so I laid the crown
Upon his head to cast away my sorrow.- Druid
What would you, king of the proud Red Branch kings?- Fergus
A king and proud! and that is my despair.
I feast amid my people on the hill,
And pace the woods, and drive my chariot-wheels
In the white border of the murmuring sea;
And still I feel the crown upon my head.- Druid
What would you, Fergus?- Fergus
Be no more a king
But learn the dreaming wisdom that is yours.- Druid
Look on my thin grey hair and hollow cheeks
And on these hands that may not lift the sword,
This body trembling like a wind-blown reed.
No woman's loved me, no man sought my help.- p.33
- Fergus
A king is but a foolish labourer
Who wastes his blood to be another's dream.- Druid
Take, if you must, this little bag of dreams;
Unloose the cord, and they will wrap you round.- Fergus
I See my life go drifting like a river
From change to change; I have been many things —
A green drop in the surge, a gleam of light
Upon a sword, a fir-tree on a hill,
An old slave grinding at a heavy quern,
A king sitting upon a chair of gold —
And all these things were wonderful and great;
But now I have grown nothing, knowing all.
Ah! Druid, Druid, how great webs of sorrow
Lay hidden in the small slate-coloured thing!
Document details
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File description
Title statement
Title (uniform): Fergus and the Druid
Author: William Butler Yeats
Responsibility statement
Electronic edition compiled and proof-read by: Beatrix Färber
Funded by: School of History, University College, Cork
Edition statement
1. First draft.
Extent: 950 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: 2014
Distributor: CELT online at University College, Cork, Ireland.
CELT document ID: E890001-003
Availability: The works by W. B. Yeats are in the public domain. This electronic text is available with prior consent of the CELT programme for purposes of private or academic research and teaching.
Notes statement
First published in May 1892, in the National Observer (A. Norman Jeffares, p. 27).
Source description
Literature (a small selection)
- W. B. Yeats, The Rose (1893).
- W. B. Yeats, Poems (London 1895).
- Sir Samuel Ferguson, Poems of Sir Samuel Ferguson (Dublin 1918).
- W. B. Yeats, The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats, consisting of Reveries over childhood and youth, The trembling of the veil, and Dramatis personae (New York 1938).
- Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks. Corrected edition with a new preface (Oxford 1979). [First published New York 1948; reprinted London 1961.]
- Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach, The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W.B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan 1957).
- W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (New York: Macmillan 1961).
- W. B. Yeats, Explorations: selected by Mrs W. B. Yeats (London/New York: Macmillan 1962).
- George Mayhew, 'A Corrected Typescript of Yeats's "Easter 1916"', Huntington Library Quarterly 27/1 (November 1963) 53–71.
- Richard Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats (New York 1964).
- A. Norman Jeffares, A New Commentary on the Poems of W.B. Yeats (Stanford 1984).
- Helen Vendler, Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (Oxford/New York 2007).
- A general bibliography is available online at the official web site of the Nobel Prize. See: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1923/yeats-bibl.html
The edition used in the digital edition
Yeats, William Butler (1991). ‘Fergus and the Druid’. In: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. Ed. by Richard J. Finneran. London: Macmillan Press, pp. 32–33.
You can add this reference to your bibliographic database by copying or downloading the following:
@incollection{E890001-003,
author = {William Butler Yeats},
title = { Fergus and the Druid},
editor = {Richard J. Finneran},
booktitle = {The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats},
publisher = {Macmillan Press},
address = { London},
date = {1991},
pages = {32–33}
}
Encoding description
Project description: CELT: Corpus of Electronic Texts
Sampling declarations
The whole poem.
Editorial declarations
Correction: The text has been proof-read twice.
Normalization: The electronic text represents the edited text.
Hyphenation: The editorial practice of the hard-copy editor has been retained.
Segmentation: div0= the individual poem, stanzas are marked lg.
Interpretation: Names of persons (given names), and places are not tagged. Terms for cultural and social roles are not tagged.
Profile description
Creation:
Date: 1892
Language usage
- The poem is in English. (en)
Keywords: Irish Saga; poetry; W. B. Yeats; 19c; Fergus Mac Roich
Revision description
(Most recent first)
- 2014-03-27: File proofed; file parsed and validated; SGML and HTML files created. (ed. Beatrix Färber)
- 2014-03-27: Structural markup applied according to CELT practice; TEI header created with bibliographical detail. (ed. Beatrix Färber)
- 1996: First proofing. (ed. Students at the CELT Project, UCC)
- 1996: Text captured (data capture Donnchadh Ó Corráin)