he great Irish poet W.B. Yeats has an exquisite lyric, “The Road at My Door”, in his sequence Meditations in Time of Civil War (1922). At the end of the short poem, he notes a moor-hen attending to her chicks and then, observing them more closely, summons a vivid and delightful visual image of the little birds, writing: “I count those feathered balls of soot / The moor-hen guides upon the stream”. About to teach the poem the other day, and not having Yeats’s Collected Poems to hand, I went online to check that I was remembering all its details correctly, and on the first site that turned up, I encountered this:
I count those feathered ***** of soot
The moor-hen guides upon the stream.
