['Do Not Make a Great Keening']

Date of composition. Cathleen Ni Houlihan was largely composed in Sep. and Oct. 1901, in collaboration with AG while WBY was at Coole. These lines come almost at the end of the play, but it is difficult to speculate on when exactly they might have been composed: though it is possible they come from the late stages of the collaboration, when WBY was asked to provide a suitably formal lament for the final minutes of the action, it is also conceivable that they were part of the scenario from which WBY, leaning heavily upon AG's ideas, began to work.