Abstract
In their Variorum Edition of the Poems, Allt and Alspach excluded from the (separately tabled) “Poems not in the Definitive Edition” “poems … that are an integral part of the context in which they appear and that were never published apart from that context” (VP 641). There were, however, two exceptions to their strict rule, and these included the optional verses to the prose version of The Hour-Glass [“I was going the road one day”].1
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Notes
Most recently, Hugh Kenner has commented that the inclusion in the edition of “three line scraps and uncanonized wonder[s]” left Finneran with “no principle on which to exclude anything else”. See his review “Whose Yeats Is It, Anyway?”, New York Times Book Review, 27 May 1990, 10.
“I timed it by the clock.” See E. H. Mikhail, W. B. Yeats Interviews and Recollections (London: Macmillan, 1977) II, p. 201).
Two early manuscript versions of the song can be found in MS NLI 30, 381 and in Yeats’s copy of The Hour-Glass. Cathleen Ni Houlihan. The Pot of Broth (London: A. H. Bullen, 1904), (Wade 53, copy 1, YL 2362);
I am grateful to Dr Catherine Phillips for supplying me with copies. S[uhcil] B. Bushrui’s “‘The Hour-Glass’: Yeats’s Revisions, 1903–1922”, in D. E. S. Maxwell and S. B. Bushrui (eds), W. B. Yeats 1865–1965: Centenary Essays on the Art of W. B. Yeats (Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1965) pp. 189–216, is not especially helpful on the matter of these verses.
See Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, New and Revised Edition (New York, Oxford, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1982) p. 334 & n.
Scribncr Archive, Princeton University, letter of 28 January 1937. George Yeats, in typing these lists, was hasty and failed fully to engage the shift when striking initial capital letters. A result was the non-alignment of capitals with lower case letters. Usually the capitals were dropped below the level of the line, as with the “O” in the second line of the second stanza on the typed slip, but there arc some further irregularities in the typed slip’s alignment of both capital and lower case letters, though not to so marked a degree is found in the lists. However, the typeface is identical to that of what is unquestionably Mrs Yeats’s typewriter, and on balance I believe she typed the slip. Certainty in such matters is not always possible. (I am grateful to Professor Finneran for pointing out one error of my own, in respect of the retyping by Scribner’s of one of Mrs Yeats’s typing of lists later in 1937. See his otherwise tendentious “Text and Interpretation in the Poems of W. B. Yeats”, in George Bornstein [ed.] Representing Modernist Texts: Editing as Interpretation [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991] pp. 17–48, at p. 25, n. 19.
A list found in the Princeton Archive and which I had claimed to be a top copy of Mrs Yeats’s is indeed a copy done in the London office of Charles Scribncr’s Sons, and the handwriting upon it is not that of VV. B. Yeats, cf. my attribution in Appendix 6 of A. Norman Jeffares’ edition, Yeats’s Poems [London: Macmillan, 1989, 1991] p. 728 & n. 59. On the hazards of serial error, see YA 9 366–7, 374–5).
As the literalisms and Gallicisms of the translation indicate, Yeats’s version had been conveyed to him orally, in all likelihood by Maud Gonnc, translating at sight from H. D’Arbois de Jubainville’s Le Cycle Mythologique Irlandais et la Mythologie Celtique (Paris: Ernest Thorin, 1884; YL 1047) pp. 317–18. Cf. PR 628.
See Gwynn’s Experiences of a Literary Man (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1926) p. 206.
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Gould, W. (1993). No Right Poem [“I was going the road one day”]. In: Gould, W. (eds) Yeats Annual No. 10. Yeats Annual. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11916-5_4
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