CELT document E910001-062

Towards Break of Day

William Butler Yeats

Whole text

     p.187

    Towards Break of Day

  1. Was it the double of my dream
    The woman that by me lay
    Dreamed, or did we halve a dream
    Under the first cold gleam of day?
  2. I thought: 'There is a waterfall
    Upon Ben Bulben side
    That all my childhood counted dear;
    Were I to travel far and wide
    I could not find a thing so dear.'
    My memories had magnified
    So many times childish delight.
  3. I would have touched it like a child
    But knew my finger could but have touched
    Cold stone and water. I grew wild.
    Even accusing Heaven because
    It had set down among its laws:
    Nothing that we love over-much
    Is ponderable to our touch.
  4. I dreamed towards break of day,
    The cold blown spray in my nostril.
    But she that beside me lay
    Had watched in bitterer sleep
    The marvellous stag of Arthur,
    That lofty white stag, leap
    From mountain steep to steep.

Document details

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Title statement

Title (uniform): Towards Break of Day

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: 737 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: E910001-062

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

Probably written in January 1919; first published in The Dial in November 1920 (A. Norman Jeffares, p. 234).

Source description

Literature (a small selection)

  1. 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).
  2. Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks. Corrected edition with a new preface (Oxford 1979). [First published New York 1948; reprinted London 1961.]
  3. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach, The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W.B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan 1957).
  4. F. A. C. Wilson, Yeats's Iconography (London 1960).
  5. W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (New York: Macmillan 1961).
  6. W. J. Keith, 'Yeats's Double Dream', Modern Language Notes 76/8 (December 1961) 710–715.
  7. W. B. Yeats, Explorations: selected by Mrs W. B. Yeats (London/New York: Macmillan 1962).
  8. Richard Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats (New York 1964).
  9. A. Norman Jeffares, A New Commentary on the Poems of W.B. Yeats (Stanford 1984).
  10. 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). ‘Towards Break of Day’. In: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats‍. Ed. by Richard J. Finneran. London: Macmillan Press, p. 187.

You can add this reference to your bibliographic database by copying or downloading the following:

@incollection{E910001-062,
  author 	 = {William Butler Yeats},
  title 	 = {Towards Break of Day},
  editor 	 = {Richard J. Finneran},
  booktitle 	 = {The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats},
  publisher 	 = {Macmillan Press},
  address 	 = { London},
  date 	 = {1991},
  pages 	 = {187}
}

 E910001-062.bib

Encoding description

Project description: CELT: Corpus of Electronic Texts

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The whole poem.

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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: Janaury 1919 [?]

Language usage

  • The poem is in English. (en)

Keywords: literary; poetry; W. B. Yeats; 20c

Revision description

(Most recent first)

  1. 2014-05-02: TEI header created with bibliographical detail. File parsed and validated; SGML and HTML files created. (ed. Beatrix Färber)
  2. 2014-05-01: Structural markup applied according to CELT practice. (ed. Rebecca Daly)
  3. 1996: First proofing. (ed. Students at the CELT Project, UCC)
  4. 1996: Text captured (data capture Donnchadh Ó Corráin)

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