Origin
of "The Lake Isle of Innisfree"
by W. B. Yeats, from his Autobiography
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I had [in London] various women friends on whom I would call towards five
o'clock mainly to discuss my thoughts that I could not bring to a man without
meeting some competing thought, but partly because their tea and toast
saved my pennies for the bus ride home; but with women, apart from their
intimate exchanges of thought, I was timid and abashed. I was sitting on
a seat in front of the British Museum feeding pigeons when a couple of
girls sat near and began enticing my pigeons away, laughing and whispering
to one another, and I looked straight in front of me, very indignant, and
presently went into the Museum without turning my head towards them. Since
then I have often wondered if they were pretty or merely very young. Sometimes
I told myself very adventurous love-stories with myself for hero, and at
other times I planned out a life of lonely austerity, and at other times
mixed the ideals and planned a life of lonely austerity mitigated by periodical
lapses. I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living
in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and
when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle
of water and saw a fountain in a shop-window which balanced a little ball
upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance
came my poem "Innisfree," my first lyric with anything in its rhythm of
my own music. I had begun to loosen rhythm as an escape from rhetoric and
from that emotion of the crowd that rhetoric brings, but I only understood
vaguely and occasionally that I must for my special purpose use nothing
but the common syntax. A couple of years later I could not have written
that first line with its conventional archaism -- "Arise and go" -- nor
the inversion of the last stanza.
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