The Island in a Shop Window

A Poetry Tale about W. B. Yeats, told by Hello Doggo.

London, the late eighteen-eighties. A young Irishman in his early twenties, rather hard up and very homesick, is walking down Fleet Street. Ink, newspapers, noise.

His name is W. B. Yeats.

Then he hears it. A little tinkle of water.

In a shop window, there’s a novelty fountain, balancing a small ball on its jet. And that’s all it takes. Suddenly he’s remembering lake water. Lough Gill, back in Sligo, and the little island of Innisfree.

Since his teens, he’d had a plan. To settle on that island like Thoreau. Yes, that Thoreau. The cabin, the pond, Walden. His father had read him bits of the book, and the boy decided Sligo could do Walden too.

Out of that shop window came the poem. The small cabin of clay and wattles, the nine bean-rows, the hive for the honey-bee.

Now, all of this is Yeats’s own story, told decades later. Nobody else on Fleet Street was taking notes. But he did give the poem a stern review. It was, he said, his first lyric with anything in its rhythm of his own music. And yet, a couple of years later, he wouldn’t have written that opening line, with its conventional archaism. “I will arise and go now.” Tut tut.

The world disagreed. It’s probably the most loved thing he ever wrote.

And he never did move to the island. He didn’t need to. He had a shop window on Fleet Street.