The poem "Brown Penny" by Yeats has a second stanza in Yeats collected
poems that differs from the commonly found second stanza, such as you'll find in a
web search. Here's what you'll find in a web search for
the second stanza (also this is the version used in the movie "Must
Love Dogs"; Christopher Plummer gives a beautiful recitation that alone makes
the movie worth seeing):
O love is the crooked thing,
There is nobody wise enough
To find out all that is in it,
For he would be thinking of love
Till the stars had run away
And the shadows eaten the moon.
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
One cannot begin it too soon.
Here's the version in the collected poems , Richard J. Finnegan, editor:
And the penny sang up in my face,
?There is nobody wise enough
To find out all that is in it,
For he would be thinking of love
That is looped in the loops of her hair,
Till the loops of time had run.?
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny.
One cannot begin it too soon.
I want to know if the commonly found version is an early version that
Yeats corrected or if the second stanza is simply not what Yeats wrote
or, basically, what's the story with the two versions? |
Clarification of Question by
litlife-ga
on
12 Aug 2005 06:47 PDT
First, thank you, Amber00. I did know, of course, that Yeats continued
to edit his poems and did find the book review gave me the link for to
be quite good. I have more information on my question. To wit: M.L.
Rosenthal in his book _Running to Paradise: Yeats's Poetic Art_ Oxford
University Press, 1997, quotes the "O love is the crooked thing"
stanza in his full quotation of the "Brown Penny." He is using The
Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, edited by Peter Allt and
Russell K. Alspach. Copyright 1919, 1928, 1933 by Macmillan Publishing
Company; copyrights renewed 1947, 1956, 1961 by Bertha Georgie Yeats.
Copyright 1940 by Georgie Yeats, renewed 1968 by Bertha Georgie Yeats,
Michael Butler Yeats, and Anne Yeats.
I still want to know how and when Yeats decided to change the poem and
why Finneran decided to choose the version he chose.
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