William Butler Yeats
Whole text
- p.36
- If you have revisited the town, thin Shade,
Whether to look upon your monument
(I wonder if the builder has been paid)
Or happier thoughted when the day is spent
To drink of that salt breath out of the sea
When grey gulls flit about instead of men,
And the gaunt houses put on majesty:
Let these content you and be gone again;
For they are at their old tricks yet.
A man
Of your own passionate serving kind who had brought p.37
In his full hands what, had they only known,
Had given their children's children loftier thought,
Sweeter emotion, working in their veins
Like gentle blood, has been driven from the place,
And insult heaped upon him for his pains
And for his open-handedness, disgrace;
An old foul mouth that slandered you had set
The pack upon him.
Go, unquiet wanderer,
And gather the Glasnevin coverlet
About your head till the dust stops your ear,
The time for you to taste of that salt breath
And listen at the corners has not come; p.38
You had enough of sorrow before death—
Away, away! You are safer in the tomb.
To a Shade
September 29th, 1914
Document details
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File description
Title statement
Title (uniform): To a Shade
Author: William Butler Yeats
Responsibility statement
Electronic edition compiled and proof-read by: Beatrix Färber and Juliette Maffet
Funded by: School of History, University College, Cork
Edition statement
1. First draft.
Extent: 590 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: E910001-008
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.
Source description
Bibliography
- A 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 (1916). ‘To a Shade’. In: Responsibilities and other Poems. Ed. by William Butler Yeats. 36–38. New York: The Macmillan Company.
You can add this reference to your bibliographic database by copying or downloading the following:
@incollection{E910001-008, author = {William Butler Yeats}, title = {To a Shade}, editor = {William Butler Yeats}, booktitle = {Responsibilities and other Poems}, publisher = {The Macmillan Company}, address = {New York}, date = {1916}, number = {36–38} }
Encoding description
Project description: CELT: Corpus of Electronic Texts
Sampling declarations
The whole selection.
Editorial declarations
Correction: Text has been proof-read twice.
Normalization: The electronic text represents the edited text. Lines (or parts of them) reproduced in italics in the printed edition are tagged rend="ital".
Hyphenation: The editorial practice of the hard-copy editor has been retained.
Segmentation: div0 =the 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: By William Butler Yeats (1865–1939).
Date: September 1914
Language usage
- The poem is in English. (en)
Keywords: literary; poetry; W. B. Yeats; 19c; 20c
Revision description
(Most recent first)
- 2012-02-08: File proofed (2), additions to encoding made; header completed; file parsed; SGML and HTML files created. (ed. Beatrix Färber)
- 2012-02-01: Header created. (ed. Juliette Maffet)
- 2012-01-23: First proofing. (ed. Juliette Maffet)
- 2012-01-18: Text captured by scanning. (file capture Juliette Maffet)