ABSTRACT
Over recent years, WBY had spent much energy on Heffernan's political poem, ‘Caitilin ni Uallachan’, in poems of 1894 and 1896 deriving from it, and he would return to it for ‘Red Hanrahan's Song About Ireland’ in 1903. In fact, the quatrain produced by WBY incorporates material from two separate quatrains by Heffernan, which are to be found on facing pages of John Daly's editorial material in Irish Jacobite Poetry: the first is, according to Daly, one of the ‘many short distichs heard amongst the people [which] bespeak [Heffernan's] poverty and his afflictions’: this gives WBY Heffernan's complaints of the need to labour painfully for his bread. The reason for WBY's decision to inscribe these lines in AG's copy of P99 is a matter of speculation.
