William Butler Yeats
Whole text
- For certain minutes at the least
That crafty demon and that loud beast
That plague me day and night
Ran out of my sight;
Though I had long perned in the gyre,
Between my hatred and desire.
I saw my freedom won
And all laugh in the sun. - The glittering eyes in a death's head
Of old Luke Wadding's portrait said
Welcome, and the Ormondes all
Nodded upon the wall,
And even Strafford smiled as though
It made him happier to know
I understood his plan.
Now that the loud beast ran
There was no portrait in the Gallery
But beckoned to sweet company,
For all men's thoughts grew clear
Being dear as mine are dear. - But soon a tear-drop started up,
For aimless joy had made me stop
Beside the little lake
To watch a white gull take
A bit of bread thrown up into the air;
Now gyring down and perning there
He splashed where an absurd
Portly green-pated bird
Shook off the water from his back;
Being no more demoniac
A stupid happy creature
Could rouse my whole nature. p.189 - Yet I am certain as can be
That every natural victory
Belongs to beast or demon,
That never yet had freeman
Right mastery of natural things,
And that mere growing old, that brings
Chilled blood, this sweetness brought;
Yet have no dearer thought
Than that I may find out a way
To make it linger half a day. - O what a sweetness strayed
Through barren Thebaid,
Or by the Mareotic sea
When that exultant Anthony
And twice a thousand more
Starved upon the shore
And withered to a bag of bones!
What had the Caesars but their thrones?
Demon and Beast
p.188Document details
The TEI Header
File description
Title statement
Title (uniform): Demon and Beast
Author: William Butler Yeats
Responsibility statement
Electronic edition compiled and proof-read by: Beatrix Färber
Funded by: School of History, University College, Cork
Edition statement
1. First draft.
Extent: 916 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: E910001-064
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 23 November 1918; first published in the Dial in November 1920 (A. Norman Jeffares, p. 235).
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 Ure, 'Yeats's 'Demon and Beast', Irish Writing 31 (Summer 1955) 42–50.
- 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).
- Paul Cohen, 'Yeats as Portraitist', Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 5/2 (Decmber 1979), 31–37.
- A. Norman Jeffares, A New Commentary on the Poems of W.B. Yeats (Stanford 1984).
- Seamus Deane, ''The Second Coming': Coming Second; Coming in a Second', Irish University Review, 22/1 (Spring/Summer 1992) 92–100.
- 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). ‘Demon and Beast’. In: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. Ed. by Richard J. Finneran. London: Macmillan Press, pp. 188–189.
You can add this reference to your bibliographic database by copying or downloading the following:
@incollection{E910001-064,
author = {William Butler Yeats},
title = {Demon and Beast},
editor = {Richard J. Finneran},
booktitle = {The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats},
publisher = {Macmillan Press},
address = { London},
date = {1991},
pages = {188–189}
}
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: 23 November 1918
Language usage
- The poem is in English. (en)
Keywords: literary; poetry; W. B. Yeats; 20c
Revision description
(Most recent first)
- 2014-04-30: Structural markup applied according to CELT practice; TEI header created with bibliographical detail. (ed. Beatrix Färber)
- 2014-02-13: File parsed and validated; SGML and HTML files created. (ed. Beatrix Färber)
- 1996: First proofing. (ed. Students at the CELT Project, UCC)
- 1996: Text captured (data capture Donnchadh Ó Corráin)