William Butler Yeats
Whole text
- p.185
- 'O words are lightly spoken,'
Said Pearse to Connolly,
'Maybe a breath of politic words
Has withered our Rose Tree;
Or maybe but a wind that blows
Across the bitter sea.' - 'It needs to be but watered,'
James Connolly replied,
'To make the green come out again
And spread on every side,
And shake the blossom from the bud
To be the garden's pride.' - 'But where can we draw water,'
Said Pearse to Connolly,
'When all the wells are parched away?
O plain as plain can be
There's nothing but our own red blood
Can make a right Rose Tree.'
Document details
The TEI Header
File description
Title statement
Title (uniform): The Rose Tree
Author: William Butler Yeats
Responsibility statement
Electronic edition compiled and proof-read by: Beatrix Färber and Rebecca Daly
Funded by: School of History, University College, Cork
Edition statement
1. First draft.
Extent: 700 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: E910001-061
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
Written on 7 April 1917; first published in The Dial in November 1920 (A. Norman Jeffares, p. 230).
Source description
Literature (a small selection)
- 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).
- Richard Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats (New York 1964).
- Georges-Denis Zimmermann, Irish Political Street Ballads and Rebel Songs (Geneva 1966) 71–72. [Makes reference to the ballad 'The Liberty Tree', which in Jeffares p. 230 is suggested to have influenced Yeats].
- A. Norman Jeffares, A New Commentary on the Poems of W.B. Yeats (Stanford 1984).
- 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
- Pádraic H. Pearse, The Coming Revolution, in: Political Writings and Speeches. (Dublin 1924) 89–99.
The edition used in the digital edition
Yeats, William Butler (1991). ‘The Rose Tree’. In: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. Ed. by Richard J. Finneran. London: Macmillan Press, p. 185.
You can add this reference to your bibliographic database by copying or downloading the following:
@incollection{E910001-061,
author = {William Butler Yeats},
title = {The Rose Tree},
editor = {Richard J. Finneran},
booktitle = {The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats},
publisher = {Macmillan Press},
address = { London},
date = {1991},
pages = {185}
}
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: 7 April 1917
Language usage
- The poem is in English. (en)
Keywords: literary; poetry; Easter Rising 1916; W. B. Yeats; 20c
Revision description
(Most recent first)
- 2014-05-02: TEI header created with bibliographical detail. File parsed and validated; SGML and HTML files created. (ed. Beatrix Färber)
- 2014-05-01: Structural markup applied according to CELT practice. (ed. Rebecca Daly)
- 1996: First proofing. (ed. Students at the CELT Project, UCC)
- 1996: Text captured (data capture Donnchadh Ó Corráin)