['O Death's Old Bony Finger']

Textual history. These lines, which first appeared in vol. 5 of CWVP08, are a revision specifically for the short stories ‘The Twisting of the Rope’ (the first stanza) and ‘Hanra-han's Vision’ (entire poem) of ‘The Happy Townland’ (1902): WBY replaces 1–4 with new lines, and the whole poem is attributed to Red Hanrahan. This position of the first stanza in ‘The Twisting of the Rope’ had been occupied on past occasions by other verses (including in 1892 and 1897 the lines ‘I never have seen maid Quiet’, and in 1905 the poem [‘I heard under a ragged hollow wood’]), but for vol. 5 of CWVP08 the poet used this revision of another poem already in print – from ISW (1903), and grouped with poems from that collection in vol. 1 of CWVP08. In the story ‘Hanrahan's Vision’ in CWVP08 and after the whole poem is given, occupying a position previously taken by lines from ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’. In this version, the poem should certainly be regarded as (in Gould and Toomey's words) ‘a radial annex to – rather than an abandoned version of – ‘The Happy Townland’’ (M, 351). Although WBY aligned the variant ‘gold’ (9) with ‘The Happy Townland’'s ‘golden’ in 1925 for EPS, he did not replace the first four lines with the longer poem's form of these at any stage. As employed in ‘Hanra-han's Vision’, the second refrain-stanza of ‘The Happy Townland’ is omitted, reducing the length of the poem overall.