CELT document E910001-063

On a Political Prisoner

William Butler Yeats

Whole text

     p.186

    On a Political Prisoner

  1. 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.
  2. 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?
  3. 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:
  4. 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.

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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)

  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. W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (New York: Macmillan 1961).
  5. W. B. Yeats, Explorations: selected by Mrs W. B. Yeats (London/New York: Macmillan 1962).
  6. Richard Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats (New York 1964).
  7. 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.
  8. A. Norman Jeffares, A New Commentary on the Poems of W.B. Yeats (Stanford 1984).
  9. Terry Eagleton, 'Politics and Sexuality in W.B. Yeats', The Crane Bag 9/2 (1985) 138–142.
  10. Adolphe Haberer, 'Yeats and MacNeice: From Context to Intertext', Irish University Review 27/2 (Autumn/Winter 1997) 219–235.
  11. George Bornstein, 'W. B. Yeats's Poetry of Aging', The Sewanee Review 120/1 (Winter 2012) 46–61.
  12. 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}
}

 E910001-063.bib

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Project description: CELT: Corpus of Electronic Texts

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The whole poem.

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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)

  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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