William Butler Yeats
Whole text
- p.186
- She that but little patience knew,
From childhood on, had now so much
A grey gull lost its fear and flew
Down to her cell and there alit,
And there endured her fingers' touch
And from her fingers ate its bit. - Did she in touching that lone wing
Recall the years before her mind
Became a bitter, an abstract thing,
Her thought some popular enmity:
Blind and leader of the blind
Drinking the foul ditch where they lie? - When long ago I saw her ride
Under Ben Bulben to the meet,
The beauty of her country-side
With all youth's lonely wildness stirred,
She seemed to have grown clean and sweet
Like any rock-bred, sea-borne bird: - Sea-borne, or balanced on the air
When first it sprang out of the nest
Upon some lofty rock to stare
Upon the cloudy canopy,
While under its storm-beaten breast
Cried out the hollows of the sea.
On a Political Prisoner
Document details
The TEI Header
File description
Title statement
Title (uniform): On a Political Prisoner
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: 794 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: E910001-063
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 between 10 and 29 January 1919; first published in The Dial in November 1920 (A. Norman Jeffares, p. 231).
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).
- Marjorie Perloff, 'Spatial Form in the Poetry of Yeats: The Two Lissadell Poems', Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 82/5 (October 1967) 444–454.
- A. Norman Jeffares, A New Commentary on the Poems of W.B. Yeats (Stanford 1984).
- Terry Eagleton, 'Politics and Sexuality in W.B. Yeats', The Crane Bag 9/2 (1985) 138–142.
- Adolphe Haberer, 'Yeats and MacNeice: From Context to Intertext', Irish University Review 27/2 (Autumn/Winter 1997) 219–235.
- George Bornstein, 'W. B. Yeats's Poetry of Aging', The Sewanee Review 120/1 (Winter 2012) 46–61.
- 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). ‘On a Political Prisoner’. In: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. Ed. by Richard J. Finneran. London: Macmillan Press, p. 186.
You can add this reference to your bibliographic database by copying or downloading the following:
@incollection{E910001-063,
author = {William Butler Yeats},
title = {On a Political Prisoner},
editor = {Richard J. Finneran},
booktitle = {The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats},
publisher = {Macmillan Press},
address = { London},
date = {1991},
pages = {186}
}
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: January 1919
Language usage
- The poem is in English. (en)
Keywords: literary; poetry; Easter Rising 1916; Constance Markievicz; 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)