Abstract
For those early lyrics which Yeats did not include in one of his collections, the text in the revised edition of The Poems generally follows the first publication. Some of these poems were reprinted in various Christmas numbers of the Irish Homestead, which was edited by Yeats’s friend George W. Russell (AE), but it is quite unlikely that Yeats was responsible for the variants in those printings. Writing to Lady Gregory on 12 December 1902 about the appearance in the journal of “She Who Dwelt among the Sycamores”, for example, Yeats complained,
No! I don’t like that Sycamore poem, I think it perfectly detestable and always did and am going to write Russell to say that the Homestead mustn’t do this kind of thing any more. I was furious last year when they revived some rambling old verses of mine but forgot about it. I wouldn’t so much mind if they said they were early verses but they print them as if they were new work. (L 390)1
In the same way, it is quite improbable that Yeats was involved in the reprinting of “Mourn — And Then Onward!” in the Irish Weekly Independent for 20 May 1893. And despite the half-hearted arguments that have been advanced, there is little possibility that Yeats was responsible for the republication of “How Ferencz Renyi Kept Silent” in the United Irishman for 24 December 1904.2
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Notes
Warwick Gould, “How Ferencz Renyi Spoke Up, Part Two”, Yeats Annual No. 3 (London: Macmillan, 1985) pp. 199–205. I am grateful to Ronald Schuchard for the information that there is no reference to this publication in Yeats’s correspondence of the period.
See John S. Kelly, “Aesthete among the Athletes”, Yeats, 2 (1984) 75–143, esp. pp. 120–43.
The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats: Volume One, 1865–1895, ed. John Kelly (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986) pp. 42–43. See also the editor’s notes to the letter.
The Death of Cuchulain: Manuscript Materials, including the Author’s Final Text, ed. Phillip L. Marcus (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1982) p. 167.
In including the poems from the plays in the revised edition of The Poems, all stage directions have been deleted; in most cases, those occurring between lines have been treated as constituting a stanza division. Inevitably some arbitrary decisions on those and other matters have been made, but I have attempted to follow Yeats’s own practice when he printed the songs from his plays as separate works. To cite just one instance, it is clear that [“Do not make a great keening”] and [“They shall be remembered for ever”] should be treated as two songs rather than one, as the music provided for them is different (see Plays in Prose and Verse [London: Macmillan, 1922] p. 447). David R. Clark’s forthcoming edition of The Plays will of course provide accurate texts for the poems from the plays in their original contexts.
In Seven Short Plays (Dublin: Maunsel, 1909) p. 201, Lady Gregory noted that “I owe the Rider’s Song … to W. B. Yeats”.
See, for example, Vivian Mercier, “Douglas Hyde’s ‘Share’ in The Unicorn from the Stars”, Modern Drama, 7, no. 4 (February 1965) 463–65. One of the queries which Mark sent Mrs. Yeats in 1939 concerned the quotation marks around the songs in The Unicorn from the Stars: “My own opinion is that the songs in The Unicorn need not have ‘quote’ to distinguish them from Mr. Yeats’s own lyrics. On the same principle we ought to have them for the quotations from Shelley, etc, in the prose works. I think that it would look rather queer, but I would rather follow your judgment in this matter. If the quotes were only required in this one play, where their purpose would be plain, they might as well go in”. Mrs. Yeats replied when she returned the list of queries to Mark on 5 July 1939: “Only in this play — It was the only play containing songs not written by WBY.” As we shall see, that statement is not altogether accurate.
In “The Sources of James Stephens’s Reincarnations: ‘Alone I did it, barring for the noble assistance of the gods’”, Tulane Studies in English, 22 (1977) 143–53, I attempted to discuss this problem in the work of another Anglo-Irish writer, using Dryden’s categories of “metaphrase”, “paraphrase”, and “imitation”.
Michael B. Yeats, “W. B. Yeats and Irish Folk Song”, Southern Folklore Quarterly, 30, no. 2 (June 1966) 158. The entire essay (pp. 153–78) is relevant to the present discussion. Here and in Appendix B I am indebted to it as well as to Roger McHugh, “James Joyce’s Synge-Song”, Envoy, 3, no. 12 (November 1950) 12–17; Michael B. Yeats, “Words and Music”, The Yeats cont’d overleaf Society of Japan: Annual Report, 8 (1970) 7–18; Colin Meir, The Ballads and Songs of W. B. Yeats: The Anglo-Irish Heritage in Subject and Style (London: Macmillan, 1974) passim; Ole Munch-Pedersen, “Yeats’s Synge-Song”, Irish University Review, 6, no. 2 (Autumn 1976) 204–13; and James Stewart, “Three That Are Watching My Time to Run”, Irish University Review, 9, no. 1 (Spring 1979) 112–18. The last two are particularly helpful in providing full information on the translations available to Yeats.
Domhnall Ó Fotharta, Siasma an Gheimhridh (Dublin: no publisher, 1892) p. 29. I am indebted to Warwick Gould for sharing with me his correspondence about the poem with Francis John Byrne and Kevin Danaher. Danaher first traced the source.
Douglas Hyde, Religious Songs of Connacht (London: T. Fisher Unwin; Dublin: M. H. Gill and Son, 1906) II, 50–53. Hyde’s translation was first published in the New Ireland Review, 12, no. 4 (December 1899) 256.
Brendan O Hehir, “Yeats and the Irish Language”, Yeats, 1 (1983) 101. O Hehir’s account (pp. 92–103) is the seminal essay on the subject.
Letters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley, intro. Kathleen Raine (London: Oxford University Press, 1964) p. 169.
I previously suggested that these proofs were also corrected by Yeats, but I now accept the view of Sandra Siegel in her edition of Purgatory: Manuscript Materials Including the Authors Final Text (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1986) p. 19, n. 32. However, Siegel quite mistakenly states that I described BL 55892 (clearly a posthumous set of proofs) as a “revised set of proofs with Yeats’s further corrections”. The source of the quotation attributed to me is a mystery.
Yeats’s “Spinning Song” was also published in the same issue. The provenance of the manuscript is unknown. Emory acquired it at Sotheby’s (London) sale of 29–30 June 1982 (lot 645).
T. R. Henn, “W. B. Yeats and the Poetry of War”, Proceedings of the British Academy, 51 (1965) 301–19; quotation from p. 310, n. 1. In his note Henn places a period after each of the variants; to include all of these results in an impossible text, as does excluding them all. There were no changes in the note when the essay was reprinted in Henn’s Last Essays (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1976), where it appears on p. 89.
Lady Gregory’s Journals, Volume One, ed. Daniel J. Murphy (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1978) p. 207. The punctuation is Lady Gregory’s. In his tribute to Robert Gregory in The Observer (17 February 1918) Yeats had written that “Major Gregory told Mr. Bernard Shaw, who visited him in France, that the months since he joined the Army had been the happiest of his life”. Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats, vol. 2, ed. John P. Frayne and Colton Johnson (London: Macmillan, 1975) p. 431. Thus Yeats had already made public Shaw’s comment. Yeats used it in “Reprisals” rather than another remark by Gregory which he recorded on the verso of one of the drafts of the poem: “Robert said to me ‘I see no reason why anyone should fight in this war except friendship. The England I care for was dead long ago’” (NLI 13,583).
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Finneran, R.J. (1990). Additional Poems. In: Editing Yeats’s Poems. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11020-9_7
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