William Butler Yeats
Whole text
- p.45
- Three old hermits took the air
By a cold and desolate sea,
First was muttering a prayer,
Second rummaged for a flea;
On a windy stone, the third,
Giddy with his hundredth year,
Sang unnoticed like a bird.
'Though the Door of Death is near
And what waits behind the door,
Three times in a single day
I, though upright on the shore,
Fall asleep when I should pray.'
So the first, but now the second,
'We're but given what we have earned
When all thoughts and deeds are reckoned,
So it's plain to be discerned p.46
That the shades of holy men,
Who have failed being weak of will,
Pass the Door of Birth again,
And are plagued by crowds, until
They've the passion to escape.'
Moaned the other, 'They are thrown
Into some most fearful shape.'
But the second mocked his moan:
'They are not changed to anything,
Having loved God once, but maybe,
To a poet or a king
Or a witty lovely lady.'
While he'd rummaged rags and hair,
Caught and cracked his flea, the third,
Giddy with his hundredth year
Sang unnoticed like a bird.
The Three Hermits
Document details
The TEI Header
File description
Title statement
Title (uniform): The Three Hermits
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: 587 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: E910001-012
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). ‘The Three Hermits’. In: Responsibilities and other Poems. Ed. by William Butler Yeats. New York: The Macmillan Company, pp. 45–46.
You can add this reference to your bibliographic database by copying or downloading the following:
@incollection{E910001-012,
author = {William Butler Yeats},
title = {The Three Hermits},
editor = {William Butler Yeats},
booktitle = {Responsibilities and other Poems},
publisher = {The Macmillan Company},
address = {New York},
date = {1916},
pages = {45–46}
}
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 hi 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). before 1916
Language usage
- The poem is in English. (en)
Keywords: literary; poetry; W. B. Yeats; 19c; 20c
Revision description
(Most recent first)
- 2012-02-10: 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)