To a Friend whose Work has come to Nothing

]> To a Friend whose Work has come to Nothing 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. 493 CELT: Corpus of Electronic Texts: a project of University College, Cork

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2012 CELT online at University College, Cork, Ireland. E910001-006

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.

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 Friend whose Work has come to Nothing William Butler Yeats Responsibilities and other Poems The Macmillan Company New York 1916 34

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Text has been proof-read twice.

The electronic text represents the edited text. Lines (or parts of thereof) reproduced in italics in the printed edition are tagged hi rend="ital".

The editorial practice of the hard-copy editor has been retained.

div0 =the poem, stanzas are marked lg.

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By William Butler Yeats (1865–1939). before 1916 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 Friend whose Work has come to Nothing Now all the truth is out, Be secret and take defeat From any brazen throat, For how can you compete, Being honour bred, with one Who, were it proved he lies, Were neither shamed in his own Nor in his neighbours' eyes? Bred to a harder thing Than Triumph, turn away And like a laughing string Whereon mad fingers play Amid a place of stone, Be secret and exult, Because of all things known That is most difficult.