]> To a Shade An electronic edition William Butler Yeats Electronic edition compiled and proof-read by Beatrix Färber Juliette Maffet School of History, University College, Cork First draft. 590 CELT: Corpus of Electronic Texts: a project of University College, Cork
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 Bibliography A 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 William Butler Yeats To a Shade William Butler Yeats Responsibilities and other Poems The Macmillan Company New York 1916 36–38

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 By William Butler Yeats (1865–1939). September 1914 The poem is in English. literary poetry W. B. Yeats 19c 20c 2012-02-08 Beatrix Färber ed. File proofed (2), additions to encoding made; header completed; file parsed; SGML and HTML files created. 2012-02-01 Juliette Maffet ed. Header created. 2012-01-23 Juliette Maffet ed. First proofing. 2012-01-18 Juliette Maffet file capture Text captured by scanning. To a Shade September 29th, 1914 If you have revisited the town, thin Shade, Whether to look upon your monument (I wonder if the builder has been paid) Or happier thoughted when the day is spent To drink of that salt breath out of the sea When grey gulls flit about instead of men, And the gaunt houses put on majesty: Let these content you and be gone again; For they are at their old tricks yet. A man Of your own passionate serving kind who had brought In his full hands what, had they only known, Had given their children's children loftier thought, Sweeter emotion, working in their veins Like gentle blood, has been driven from the place, And insult heaped upon him for his pains And for his open-handedness, disgrace; An old foul mouth that slandered you had set The pack upon him. Go, unquiet wanderer, And gather the Glasnevin coverlet About your head till the dust stops your ear, The time for you to taste of that salt breath And listen at the corners has not come; You had enough of sorrow before death— Away, away! You are safer in the tomb.