41 - Yeats

Summary

In Yeats’s largely autobiographical novelette John Sherman, his eponymous hero, displaced in London, walking along the bank of the Thames, realises that the evocative scenery of an English landscape is alien to him. London, Sherman feels, could not be possessed by a young Irishman who finds himself gazing at the scene ‘with foreign eyes’ and the reason for this sense of alienation is that London could not be possessed because ‘everything in London was owned by too many to be owned by anyone’. John Sherman, written in 1888 when Yeats was twenty-three, was an attempt to come to terms with his divided self – his Anglo-Irish identity. William Murphy perceived that the novella was based primarily on Yeats himself, who ‘poured all my grievances against this melancholy London’ where Yeats was living with his artist father.

The loss of individuality in the metropolis brought about a twinge of nostalgia for Ireland, for the serenity of the Irish countryside. A wooden ball floating on a little water jet in a shop window in the Strand and the sound of dripping water suggested to Yeats the sound of a cataract with a long Gaelic name. This in turn evoked an old daydream about a lake where he had once gone blackberry picking – in actual fact the Lake of Innisfree, which occasioned one of Yeats’s finest early lyrical poems. The assertive first line, ‘I will arise and go now’, is a remote resonance of the prodigal son’s decision, in dejection, to leave a foreign land and return to the comfort of his father’s house, and contrasts with the relaxed, musical modulations of the rest of the poem.