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Some Textual Problems in Yeats
by
Russell K. Alspach
[*]
THIS PAPER IS BASED ON THE VARIORUM EDITION of Yeats's poems that Peter Allt, late professor of Anglo-Irish literature at the University of Groningen, and I have been preparing jointly for some ten years. Because of Peter Allt's untimely death in an accident in London two years ago the finishing of the work fell to me. His death was a severe personal blow, and it was a great loss to Yeats' scholarship.
In our work, we confined ourselves to versions of Yeats's poems published by him in magazine or book. We included no manuscript versions—they are quite numerous and widely scattered, and comparatively few are available for study. (And no manuscript version has the final polishing of proofreading by Yeats.) Nor did we include versions of his poems quoted by other writers, e.g. Katharine Tynan[1] and Dorothy Wellesley.[2] At best these are secondhand. As our standard text we used the two-volume limited and signed edition of The Poems of W. B. Yeats published by Macmillan of London in 1949. The publisher's brochure that accompanied this edition reads in part:
Under revisions I include all changes, even those in punctuation. Perhaps this is dangerous ground; much has been said about Yeats's carelessness in, and lack of knowledge of, punctuation. But the testimony varies. We know, for instance, that he wrote to Robert Bridges in 1915 that 'I chiefly remember that you asked me about stops and commas. Do what you will. I do not understand stops. I write so completely for the ear that I feel helpless when I have to measure pauses by stops and commas.'[3] But Mrs. Yeats told me in the summer of 1954 that she believed shifts in punctuation were very much a problem in any textual study of her husband's work, that W. B. was careful about 'stops and commas,' and that several times he had become quite irate with a publisher who had taken it upon himself to change the poet's punctuation. It took me a long time to convince my colleague on the variorum that punctuation must be noted. His point of view originally, and the point of view of others, was that it should be noted only where the meaning or rhythm is affected. But who is to judge where the meaning or rhythm is affected? Certainly not the textual critic or scholar who is working in the realm of facts and not of aesthetics. And in the case of Yeats the conflicting testimony about his knowledge of punctuation must be kept in mind. I believe further that a close study of the punctuational changes in his verse will convince others, as it has me, that these changes were in the main deliberate and not accidental.
That Yeats was an inveterate revisor soon became apparent to discriminating readers of his poetry during the years in which it was being published. He continued to revise until the end; he was never content. He comments often about his revisions. The best-known of these comments is the quatrain he wrote for the second volume of The Collected Works of 1908:
Whenever I remake a song,
Must know what issue is at stake:
It is myself that I remake.[4]
In any textual study of Yeats's poems no edition, printing, impression, or reissue can be ignored. For example, the volume Later Poems was published in London in 1922 and reprinted there the same year. These printings are identical. In February 1924 it was reprinted again; this time there are a number of changes. In April 1924 it was published in New York, and this printing differed from the London printings of 1922 and February 1924. In 1926 and 1931 there were further reprintings in London: these printings differ from all previous printings and from each other. (A New York reprint of 1928 is identical to the first New York printing, that of 1924.) A second example is the trade edition of The Wild Swans at Coole, published in London and New York in 1919. These are identical. But a London reprint of 1920 has several changes. It is here, for instance, that we have for the first time the final form of 'An Irish Airman Foresees His Death.' A third example is the Selected Poems of 1929, published only in London. (Parenthetically, this is usually ignored by Yeats's textual critics, but textually it is very important. Many of the changes ascribed to Collected Poems (1933)[6] actually appeared first here.) Selected Poems was reprinted in 1930, 1932, 1936, 1938, 1951, and 1952—the last two in the Golden Treasury series. The printings of 1929, 1930, and 1932 are identical; but there are changes for the 1936 printing. From then on the printings are the same.
Nor can it be assumed that simultaneous periodical publication
in Britain and America meant identity of form. In her admirable
study of Yeats's revisions of his later poems, Professor Witt[7] has discussed a case in point: that
of
'Among Schoolchildren' published first in both The Dial and
The London Mercury for August 1927. Other examples are
numerous. 'The Two Kings' appeared in Poetry and
The
British Review in October 1913. In the 252 lines of these first
printings there are over fifty changes, great and small, between
the two. In 'Upon a Dying Lady,' in The Little Review,
August 1917, and The New Statesman, 11 August 1917, there
are some twenty changes in the seventy-three lines. And between the
versions of 'The Second Coming' in The
So far in these examples I have been pointing up the truth of Yeats's assertion about 'always cutting out the dead wood,' and assertion that would have lead one to believe that if he had the latest-dated Yeats volume he had the latest versions of its contents. But there are curious exceptions, exceptions where 'dead wood' persisted beside 'live wood.' One of these is The Wind Among the Reeds, published in London and New York in 1899, and reprinted in both places a number of times. The last printing was London, 1911, called the 'sixth edition.'[8] All printings are identical. But in the meantime The Wind Among the Reeds was revised for the first volume of the 1906 Poetical Works published only in America,[9] and again revised for the first volume of the 1908 Collected Works published only in England. In 1908, therefore, we have in print three versions of the poems in The Wind Among the Reeds: the original version, the version in The Poetical Works I (1906), and the version in The Collected Works I (1908). To add to the mixup, The Poetical Works I (1906) was reprinted nine times, with no changes, to 1922. The same anomaly happens with the 1931 printing of Later Poems that, while it has revisions, does not have all the revisions made for the 1929 Selected Poems. And the 1936 revised printing of Selected Poems does not have all the revisions of the 1933 Collected Poems. An accurate study of the development of a Yeats poem demands, it seems to me, the ability to work one's way through this maze in order to recognize the 'dead wood' and the 'live wood.'
Closely allied to the 'dead wood' and 'live wood' textual problem is the problem of the 'early' Yeats and the 'later' Yeats. Any one even faintly familiar with Yeats is aware of this much-discussed division of his work. The difficulty is the wide variance of opinion about where 'early' stops and 'later' begins. One critic dates the 'early' Yeats from 1889 to 1901, another from 1889 to 1910, and another from 1889 to 1914. Perhaps we cannot do better than take the poet's own dates in definition of 'early' and 'later.'
He first uses the words 'Early Poems' in 1906 as a subheading in The Poetical Works I. Under 'Early Poems' he includes the long narrative
The term 'later poems' he uses, and by using defines, just once: as the title of the 1922 Later Poems, that includes verse from the following volumes: The Wind Among the Reeds (1899), In the Seven Woods (1903), Poems 1899-1905 (London and Dublin, 1906), The Green Helmet and Other Poems (New York and London, 1912), Responsibilities (London; New York, 1916), The Wild Swans at Coole (London; New York, 1919), and Michael Robartes and the Dancer (Cuala Press, Dundrum, 1921). The line of demarcation seems clear.
But having decided the dates of 'early,' the textual critic must next determine just what an early Yeats poem is: i.e., is it an early poem through all its revisions, or is it an early poem through only some of its revisions, or is it an early poem in only its first printing? Of the forty early poems, including 'The Wanderings of Oisin,' in the definitive edition there is not one that was not revised in greater or less degree.
In the first, that in East and West (November 1889) they read:
Bring my brown hunter near,
And lead him slowly to and fro,
My Lollard old and dear.
My Dermot dear and brown,
And lead him gently in a ring,
And slowly up and down.
My Dermot dear and brown,
And lead him gently in a ring
And gently up and down.
The same difficulty is present in 'The Madness of King Goll' that likewise has several early versions: the first in The Leisure Hour for September 1887, the second in Poems and Ballads of Young Ireland
There are other examples at hand, but these illustrate sufficiently something of the problem inherent in the term 'early poem' and likewise the possible errors inherent in a study of 'the early version' of a poem. To come back to my question, 'What is an "early Yeats poem"?', I should answer it by saying that it is a poem written originally before 1892. And immediately I should add that in any discussion of such a poem the details of its early publication must be given and the exact printing date of any quotation.
Revisions of the early poems continued, as I said, right up to the end. It is not until the definitive edition, for example, that we can clear up the vexing question of whether line 39 in 'The Song of the Happy Shepherd' should be 'Rewarding in melodious guile' or 'Rewording in melodious guile.' The textual history of the line is curious and provocative. In the first printing, in The Dublin University Review for October 1885, and in successive printings up to the 1901 revision of Poems (1895), it was 'Rewording.' In the 1904 revision of Poems (1895) it became 'Rewarding.' In The Poetical Works I (1906) and The Collected Works I (1908) it is 'Rewording.' But in the 1908 revision of Poems (1895) and in all subsequent printings through Collected Poems (1933) it is 'Rewarding.' In the definitive edition it becomes 'Rewording'—a reversion to the original word and concept. (I am aware that what sometimes seem to be reversions in an author's work are nothing more in fact than the careless use of an earlier edition as copy for a later edition, but the reversions discussed in this paper were, I believe, purposely made by Yeats and represent a rejection of his own revisions.) Another revision in the same edition is a punctuational change—again a reversion—in line 7 of 'Ephemera,' 'When the poor tired child, Passion, falls asleep.' In the first printing, The Wanderings of Oisin, etc. (1889), the terminal punctuation was a period; but in the next printing, Poems (1895), the period was replaced by a
He even revised, in the definitive edition, his spelling of certain Gaelic names. In 'The Wanderings of Oisin,' for instance, 'Aed' becomes 'Aedh,' and 'Blanid' becomes 'Blanaid' (although the trade editions of 1950 and 1951 do not have the latter change[10]). He makes several slight punctuational revisions in the same poem; an example is the deletion of the terminal commas of lines 405 and 406, Book I. Here are lines 404-407 as they appear in all printings from Poems (1895) through Collected Poems (1950-51) except the definitive edition:
And bends to the fire and shakes with the cold,
While his heart still dreams of battle and love,
And the cry of the hounds on the hills of old.
And bends to the fire and shakes with the cold
While his heart still dreams of battle and love
And the cry of the hounds on the hills of old.
Collected Poems (1933), given frequently by textual critics as the source of numerous revisions, has actually not very many and they are not very extensive. Among them are the insertion of a comma after 'last' in line 33 of 'The Rose of Battle': 'And when at last, defeated in His wars'; the hyphenation of 'bean-rows' and 'honey-bee' in line 3 of 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree'; the final changing of 'will' to 'with' in 'When You Are Old': 'And loved your beauty with love false or true' [the printings oscillate between 'with' and 'will,' the first 'will,'[11] that displaces the original 'with,' being perhaps due to a misprint]; the substitution of 'fear' for 'fears' in line 6 of 'Who Goes with Fergus?': 'And brood on hopes and fear no more'—it had been 'fears' from the
Selected Poems (1929) includes thirteen of the shorter early poems and 'The Wanderings of Oisin.' Of the thirteen shorter poems, six are revised slightly. Two have major revisions, 'The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland' and 'The Two Trees,' revisions often credited to Collected Poems (1933). One critic strides in thus: 'Yet in rewriting the poem ['The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland'] for the 1933 Collected Poems . . . .' Our critic buttresses this surprising statement by boldly assigning the following versions of lines 41 and 42 to the 1901 revision of Poems (1895):
Proclaiming with a low and reedy cry . . .
Proclaim with that unwearied, reedy cry . . . .
A-telling with their low and reedy cry.
The extensive revisions in 'The Two Trees' for Selected Poems are exemplified by the changes in lines 13-20. The original version of these lines that except for two unimportant punctuational changes lasted from its first printing in The Countess Kathleen, etc. (1892) through the final reprinting in 1929 of Poems (1895), reads,
Winged Loves borne on in gentle strife,
Tossing and tossing to and fro
The flaming circle of our life.
When looking on their shaken hair,
And dreaming how they dance and dart,
Thine eyes grow full of tender care:
Beloved, gaze in thine own heart.
The flaming circle of our days,
Gyring, spiring to and fro
In those great ignorant leafy ways;
Remembering all that shaken hair
And how the wingèd sandals dart,
Thine eyes grow full of tender care:
Beloved, gaze in thine own heart.
For 'The Wanderings of Oisin' there are fifty-two changes, forty-two of which are punctuational with seven of the forty-two changes being reversions. The remaining ten changes are word and phrase revisions, with five 'maidens' becoming 'ladies.' One wonders whether to ascribe this to the years or better diction.
Revisions for Early Poems and Stories (1925) and for the 1927 edition of Poems (1895) are considerable, among others being 'Fergus and the Druid,' 'A Cradle Song,' 'The Sorrow of Love,' 'The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner,' and 'To Ireland in the Coming Times' for the 1925 volume; 'The Ballad of the Foxhunter' and 'The Countess Cathleen in Paradise,' for the 1927 volume. 'The Dedication to a Book of Stories selected from the Irish Novelists' was revised originally for its publication in The Irish Statesman for 8 November 1924; it was
For Early Poems and Stories Yeats changed the title from 'The Death of Cuchulain,' deleted seven lines, and redid forty-two of the remaining eighty-six lines. For the 1927 Poems he deleted one line and redid twenty-two—ten of which he had just finished revising in 1925. Probably the most striking of the changes is the new ending of the poem, done for Early Poems and Stories. Here is the ending[12] Yeats revised:
Stood up, and came to the long sands alone:
For four days warred he with the bitter tide;
And the waves flowed above him, and he died.
Stared on the horses of the sea, and heard
The cars of battle and his own name cried;
And fought with the invulnerable tide.
'The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner' was made over for the 1925 volume into an entirely new poem. This rewriting has been discussed again and again; so far as I know, however, no one has commented on the brilliantly bitter and savage satire in the mere use of the word 'transfigure.'[13]
Numerous other revisions of the early poems occur in the following volumes[14] —going back chronologically from 1925: the 1912 reprinting of Poems (1895), The Collected Works I (1908), the 1901 reprinting of Poems (1895), the 1899 reprinting of the same volume, the 1895 Poems itself, The Countess Kathleen, etc. (1892), and The Wanderings of Oisin, etc. (1889). The last two are listed because of the many changes Yeats made between initial periodical publication and publication in these first two volumes of his verse. There is, as I have implied, a tendency either to ignore the earliest changes or to be unaware of them and to assign the first revisions to Poems (1895).
I have emphasized by mention or discussion a number of the volumes for which the early poems were revised. A ranking of these volumes based on the number of revisions would show, in my opinion, Poems (1895) as easily the first, followed by The Countess Kathleen, etc. (1892), The Wanderings of Oisin, etc. (1889), the 1912 reprinting of Poems (1895), Early Poems and Stories (1925), the 1899 reprinting of Poems (1895), The Collected Works I (1908), the 1901 and the 1927 reprintings of Poems (1895) in that order, Collected Poems (1933), and The Poems of W. B. Yeats I (1949). A ranking based on the significance of the revisions would show Poems (1895) as again first, followed by the 1925, 1912, 1908, 1892, 1899, 1901, 1927, 1889, 1933, and 1949 volumes. Selected Poems (1929), despite its importance, is not listed because it includes less than half the early poems. I think my ranking of the order of significance would be authenticated by a detailed study, a study that I believe would likewise show that reversions in later printings of the early poems most often go back to the 1889 and 1908 volumes.
Before leaving the early poems I'd like to call attention to some of the lines that should have been revised. One example is lines 15 and 16 of 'The Sad Shepherd': 'But naught they heard, for they are always listening, / The dewdrops, for the sound of their own dropping.'—almost unchanged in all printings; another is lines 5-8 in 'The Falling of the Leaves,' with its tongue-twisting line 6:
And weary and worn are our sad souls now;
Let us part, ere the season of passion forget us,
With a kiss and a tear on thy drooping brow.
Thy wandering steps across the sea?
To this dim shore those gentle feet?
To this dim shore on foam wet feet?
Ran through the foam and ran to this
That I might have your son to kiss.
The later poems, using Yeats's own division, include everything from The Wind Among the Reeds (1899) to Last Poems and Plays (London; New York, 1940), a total of 346 poems. The observations made and the conclusions reached about any textual study of the early poems are likewise applicable to the later poems. This is borne out by the incidental references I have made so far to the texts of a few of the later poems.
Beginning in 1903 a new textual source, the Dun Emer press, after 1907 called the Cuala press, comes into the picture. The Dun Emer press was started by Yeats's sister Elizabeth. Yeats himself took an active part in its work and for some years chose and edited the books it issued, as well as having most of his own poems, beginning with In the Seven Woods (1903), printed by it. As a matter of statistics, there are 308 poems in the definitive edition that date from 1903 to January 1939; of these, 264 are in Dun Emer-Cuala books and of that number 94 are first printings.
Because of Yeats's close supervision of the Cuala press books, one
But apparently the magic of the words 'Cuala Press' indicated to at least one critic that if a Yeats poem was printed in a Cuala press edition the poem would never again be changed. So in discussing 'Broken Dreams' and 'The Second Coming' from 'the 1918 and the 1920 volumes, . . . The Wild Swans at Coole and Michael Robartes and the Dancer,' he gives these two Cuala press volumes as the sources for his quotations from the two poems. But in both cases he quotes 1933 versions. This is not too serious for 'Broken Dreams' where the changes are minor, but it is rather disastrous for 'The Second Coming.' The version of that poem in Michael Robartes and the Dancer has, as lines 13 and 17,
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
I have indicated that just as we are in trouble with the careless use of the phrase 'early poem,' so with the phrase 'later poem.' Here, for example, we have one of Yeats's biographers talking about the poems in In the Seven Woods (1903) and saying that 'The first, and perhaps the finest poem in the new "middle-aged" group, was "The Folly of Being Comforted."', and he then cites lines 7-14 of, presumably, the
Because of that great nobleness of hers;
The fire that stirs about her, when she stirs
Burns but more clearly;
Because of that great nobleness of hers
The fire that stirs about her, when she stirs
Burns but more clearly.
The more important revision volumes for the later poems are The Wind Among the Reeds (1899)—on the basis of the many revisions from initial magazine printings; Poems 1899-1905 (1906); The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1912); Responsibilities (1916); Later Poems (1922); The Tower (London; New York, 1928); The Winding Stair and Other Poems (London; New York, 1933); Collected Poems (1933); and A Full Moon in March (London, 1935). It would be misleading to list these volumes in an order based either on number or significance of revisions, for in only two of them, Later Poems and
These, then, are some of the textual facts and problems the student of Yeats must deal with. There are others: for instance, the existence of one version of a poem in the prose works and another version in the poetry volumes, examples being 'The Moods,' 'Into the Twilight,' and 'The Happy Townland';[15] or the scores of title changes Yeats made;[16] or the changes made for, apparently, the sake of the rhythm only: 'They'd mauled and bitten the night through' to 'They mauled and bit the whole night through';[17] or 'They'll cough in the ink to the world's end,' to 'All shuffle there; all cough in ink.'[18]
Finally, two amusing revisions, the second probably a misprint.
In the first printing of the poem 'Lullaby' in The New Keepsake (London, 1931) lines 3-6 read
What were they when Paris found
Sleep upon a golden bed
That first dawn in Helen's arms?
To mighty Paris when he found
Sleep upon a golden bed
That first night in Helen's arms?
The second, the probable misprint, concerns line 36 of 'Adam's Curse': 'To love you in the old high way of love.' In three of the printings, The Gael (February 1903),[19] The Poetical Works I (1906), and Selected Poems (1921) the words 'high' and 'way' have been joined, and the line reads 'To love you in the old highway of love.'
I give these two revisions to the Freudians 'for free.'
Notes
The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats (8 vols., Stratford-on-Avon, 1908), II. [viii].
Marion Witt, "A Competition for Eternity: Yeats's Revision of His Later Poems," PMLA, LXIV (1949), 40-58.
A correspondent has informed me that he has seen a sixth edition with an American imprint on the verso of the title page. I have seen only the London edition.
The Poetical Works of William B. Yeats (2 vols., New York, 1906). Vol. I, Lyrical Poems; vol. II, Dramatical Poems.
In the 1912 revision of Poems (1895). The 'will' remains in the 1913, 1919, 1920, 1922(2), 1923, and 1924 reprintings of Poems (1895); in Early Poems and Stories (1925); in the first two printings of The Augustan Books of English Poetry/W. B. Yeats (London, 1927, 1928); and in the first three printings of Selected Poems (London, 1929, 1930, 1932). But in A Selection from the Love Poetry, etc. (1913) and in Selected Poems (1921) it is 'with.'
Except for minor altering these lines had not been changed from their original form in United Ireland, 11 June 1892, until the major revision discussed here.
I refer, of course, to the last line of the three stanzas in the rewritten version: 'Ere Time transfigured me' at the end of the first stanza, and 'That has transfigured me' at the end of the second and third stanzas.
There were revisions for all the volumes in which the early poems were printed; those volumes I mention were the more extensively revised.
'The Moods.' Originally in The Bookman (August 1893). With minor changes, and no title, reprinted in The Celtic Twilight (London, December 1893; New York, 1894), in the revised The Celtic Twilight (London; New York: 1902; rptd. London and Stratford-upon-Avon, 1911), and in The Collected Works V (1908). But for The Wind Among the Reeds (1899) the title was restored, marked changes were made in several lines, and in this form it was printed in The Poetical Works I (1906), The Collected Works I (1908), and so on through the definitive edition. 'Into the Twilight.' Originally in The National Observer (29 July 1893) entitled 'The Celtic Twilight.' With a new title 'Into the Twilight' and minor changes reprinted in The Celtic Twilight (1893, 1894), in the revised The Celtic Twilight (1902, rptd 1911), in The Collected Works V (1908), and in Early Poems and Stories (1925). In the course of these printings a few additional changes were made. But for The Wind Among the Reeds (1899) marked changes were made . . . . [The remander of this note is the same as that for 'The Moods.'] 'The Happy Townland.' Originally in The Weekly Critical Review, June 1903; then with a new title 'The Rider from the North' in In the Seven Woods (1903); with the original title restored, in Poems, 1899-1905 (1906), and so on through the definitive edition. But for The Collected Works V (1908), Stories of Red Hanrahan (London and Stratford-upon-Avon; New York: 1913), Early Poems and Stories (1925), and Stories of Red Hanrahan (London, 1927) lines 1-12, much changed, are in the story 'The Twisting of the Rope,' and lines 1-32 and 41-60, with the same changes in lines 1-12 but the other lines unchanged, are in the story 'Hanrahan's Vision.'
From 'The Three Beggars.' The earlier version of the line is in the first three printings: Harper's Weekly (15 November 1931), Responsibilities (Cuala Press, 1914), and Responsibilities (London; New York: 1916); the later and final version begins with the fourth printing: Later Poems (1922).
From 'The Scholars.' The original version of lines 7-10 that lasted from their first printing in the Catholic Anthology (1914-1915) (London, 1915) through the 1926 revision of Later Poems (1922) are They'll cough in the ink to the world's end; Wear out the carpet with their shoes Earning respect; have no strange friend; If they have sinned nobody knows: The revised version, first in Selected Poems (1929), is All shuffle there; all cough in ink; All wear the carpet with their shoes; All think what other people think; All know the man their neighbour knows.
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