Reveries over Childhood and Youth
Reveries over Childhood and YouthREVERIES OVER CHILDHOOD AND YOUTHIIIIIIVVVIVIIVIIIIXXXIXIIXIIIXIVXVXVIXVIIXVIIIXIXXXXXIXXIIXXIIIXXIVXXVXXVIXXVIIXXVIIIXXIXXXXXXXIXXXIIXXXIIICopyright
Reveries over Childhood and Youth
W. B. Yeats
REVERIES OVER CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH
My first memories are fragmentary and isolated and
contemporaneous, as though one remembered vaguely some early day of
the Seven Days. It seems as if time had not yet been created, for
all are connected with emotion and place and without
sequence.I remember sitting upon somebody’s knee, looking out of a
window at a wall covered with cracked and falling plaster, but what
wall I do not remember, and being told that some relation once
lived there. I am looking out of another window in London. It is at
Fitzroy Road. Some boys are playing in the road and among them a
boy in uniform, a telegraph boy perhaps. When I ask who the boy is,
a servant tells me that he is going to blow the town up, and I go
to sleep in terror.After that come memories of Sligo, where I live with my
grandparents. I am sitting on the ground looking at a mastless toy
boat, with the paint rubbed and scratched, and I say to myself in
great melancholy, “it is further away than it used to be,” and
while I am saying it I am looking at a long scratch in the stern,
for it is especially the scratch which is further away. Then one
day at dinner my great-uncle William Middleton says, “we should not
make light of the troubles of children. They are worse than ours,
because we can see the end of our trouble and they can never see
any end,” and I feel grateful for I know that I am very unhappy and
have often said to myself, “when you grow up, never talk as
grown-up people do of the happiness of childhood.” I may have
already had the night of misery when, having prayed for several
days that I might die, I had begun to be afraid that I was dying
and prayed that I might live. There was no reason for my
unhappiness. Nobody was unkind, and my grandmother has still after
so many years my gratitude and my reverence. The house was so big
that there was always a room to hide in, and I had a red pony and a
garden where I could wander, and there were two dogs to follow at
my heels, one white with some black spots on his head and the other
with long black hair all over him. I used to think about God and
fancy that I was very wicked, and one day when I threw a stone and
hit a duck in the yard by mischance and broke its wing, I was full
of wonder when I was told that the duck would be cooked for dinner
and that I should not be punished.Some of my misery was loneliness and some of it fear of old
William Pollexfen my grandfather. He was never unkind, and I cannot
remember that he ever spoke harshly to me, but it was the custom to
fear and admire him. He had won the freedom of some Spanish city
for saving life, but was so silent that his wife never knew it till
he was near eighty, and then from the chance visit of some old
sailor. She asked him if it was true and he said it was true, but
she knew him too well to question and his old shipmate had left the
town. She too had the habit of fear. We knew that he had been in
many parts of the world, for there was a great scar on his hand
made by a whaling-hook, and in the dining-room was a cabinet with
bits of coral in it and a jar of water from the Jordan for the
baptising of his children and Chinese pictures upon rice-paper and
an ivory walking-stick from India that came to me after his death.
He had great physical strength and had the reputation of never
ordering a man to do anything he would not do himself. He owned
many sailing ships and once, when a captain just come to anchor at
Rosses Point reported something wrong with the rudder, had sent a
messenger to say “send a man down to find out what’s wrong.” “The
crew all refuse” was the answer. “Go down yourself” was my
grandfather’s order, and when that was not obeyed, he dived from
the main deck, all the neighbourhood lined along the pebbles of the
shore. He came up with his skin torn but well informed about the
rudder. He had a violent temper and kept a hatchet at his bedside
for burglars and would knock a man down instead of going to law,
and I once saw him hunt a group of men with a horsewhip. He had no
relation for he was an only child, and being solitary and silent,
he had few friends. He corresponded with Campbell of Islay who had
befriended him and his crew after a shipwreck, and Captain Webb,
the first man who had swum the Channel and who was drowned swimming
the Niagara Rapids, had been a mate in his employ and became a
close friend. That is all the friends I can remember and yet he was
so looked up to and admired that when he returned from taking the
waters at Bath his men would light bonfires along the railway line
for miles, while his partner William Middleton whose father after
the great famine had attended the sick for weeks, and taken cholera
from a man he carried in his arms into his own house and died of
it, and was himself civil to everybody and a cleverer man than my
grandfather, came and went without notice. I think I confused my
grandfather with God, for I remember in one of my attacks of
melancholy praying that he might punish me for my sins, and I was
shocked and astonished when a daring little girl—a cousin I
think—having waited under a group of trees in the avenue, where she
knew he would pass near four o’clock on the way to his dinner, said
to him, “if I were you and you were a little girl, I would give you
a doll.”Yet for all my admiration and alarm, neither I nor anyone
else thought it wrong to outwit his violence or his rigour; and his
lack of suspicion and a certain helplessness made that easy while
it stirred our affection. When I must have been still a very little
boy, seven or eight years old perhaps, an uncle called me out of
bed one night, to ride the five or six miles to Rosses Point to
borrow a railway-pass from a cousin. My grandfather had one, but
thought it dishonest to let another use it, but the cousin was not
so particular. I was let out through a gate that opened upon a
little lane beside the garden away from ear-shot of the house, and
rode delighted through the moonlight, and awoke my cousin in the
small hours by tapping on his window with a whip. I was home again
by two or three in the morning and found the coachman waiting in
the little lane. My grandfather would not have thought such an
adventure possible, for every night at eight he believed that the
stable-yard was locked, and he knew that he was brought the key.
Some servant had once got into trouble at night and so he had
arranged that they should all be locked in. He never knew, what
everybody else in the house knew, that for all the ceremonious
bringing of the key the gate was never locked.Even to-day when I read “King Lear” his image is always
before me and I often wonder if the delight in passionate men in my
plays and in my poetry is more than his memory. He must have been
ignorant, though I could not judge him in my childhood, for he had
run away to sea when a boy, “gone to sea through the hawse-hole” as
he phrased it, and I can but remember him with two books—his Bible
and Falconer’s “Shipwreck,” a little green-covered book that lay
always upon his table; he belonged to some younger branch of an old
Cornish family. His father had been in the Army, had retired to
become an owner of sailing ships, and an engraving of some old
family place my grandfather thought should have been his hung next
a painted coat of arms in the little back parlour. His mother had
been a Wexford woman, and there was a tradition that his family had
been linked with Ireland for generations and once had their share
in the old Spanish trade with Galway. He had a good deal of pride
and disliked his neighbours, whereas his wife, a Middleton, was
gentle and patient and did many charities in the little back
parlour among frieze coats and shawled heads, and every night when
she saw him asleep went the round of the house alone with a candle
to make certain there was no burglar in danger of the hatchet. She
was a true lover of her garden and before the care of her house had
grown upon her, would choose some favourite among her flowers and
copy it upon rice-paper. I saw some of her handiwork the other day
and I wondered at the delicacy of form and colour and at a handling
that may have needed a magnifying glass it was so minute. I can
remember no other pictures but the Chinese paintings, and some
coloured prints of battles in the Crimea upon the wall of a
passage, and the painting of a ship at the passage end darkened by
time.My grown-up uncles and aunts, my grandfather’s many sons and
daughters, came and went, and almost all they said or did has faded
from my memory, except a few harsh words that convince me by a
vividness out of proportion to their harshness that all were
habitually kind and considerate. The youngest of my uncles was
stout and humorous and had a tongue of leather over the keyhole of
his door to keep the draught out, and another whose bedroom was at
the end of a long stone passage had a model turret ship in a glass
case. He was a clever man and had designed the Sligo quays, but was
now going mad and inventing a vessel of war that could not be sunk,
his pamphlet explained, because of a hull of solid wood. Only six
months ago my sister awoke dreaming that she held a wingless
sea-bird in her arms and presently she heard that he had died in
his mad-house, for a sea-bird is the omen that announces the death
or danger of a Pollexfen. An uncle, George Pollexfen, afterwards
astrologer and mystic, and my dear friend, came but seldom from
Ballina, once to a race meeting with two postillions dressed in
green; and there was that younger uncle who had sent me for the
railway-pass. He was my grandmother’s favourite, and had, the
servants told me, been sent away from school for taking a crowbar
to a bully.I can only remember my grandmother punishing me once. I was
playing in the kitchen and a servant in horseplay pulled my shirt
out of my trousers in front just as my grandmother came in and I,
accused of I knew not what childish indecency, was given my dinner
in a room by myself. But I was always afraid of my uncles and
aunts, and once the uncle who had taken the crowbar to the bully
found me eating lunch which my grandmother had given me and
reproved me for it and made me ashamed. We breakfasted at nine and
dined at four and it was considered self-indulgent to eat anything
between meals; and once an aunt told me that I had reined in my
pony and struck it at the same moment that I might show it off as I
rode through the town, and I, because I had been accused of what I
thought a very dark crime, had a night of misery. Indeed I remember
little of childhood but its pain. I have grown happier with every
year of life as though gradually conquering something in myself,
for certainly my miseries were not made by others but were a part
of my own mind.
II
II
One day someone spoke to me of the voice of the conscience,
and as I brooded over the phrase I came to think that my soul,
because I did not hear an articulate voice, was lost. I had some
wretched days until being alone with one of my aunts I heard a
whisper in my ear, “what a tease you are!” At first I thought my
aunt must have spoken, but when I found she had not, I concluded it
was the voice of my conscience and was happy again. From that day
the voice has come to me at moments of crisis, but now it is a
voice in my head that is sudden and startling. It does not tell me
what to do, but often reproves me. It will say perhaps, “that is
unjust” of some thought; and once when I complained that a prayer
had not been heard, it said, “you have been helped.” I had a little
flagstaff in front of the house and a red flag with the Union Jack
in the corner. Every night I pulled my flag down and folded it up
and laid it on a shelf in my bedroom, and one morning before
breakfast I found it, though I knew I had folded it up the night
before, knotted round the bottom of the flagstaff so that it was
touching the grass. I must have heard the servants talking of the
faeries for I concluded at once that a faery had tied those four
knots and from that on believed that one had whispered in my ear. I
have been told, though I do not remember it myself, that I saw,
whether once or many times I do not know, a supernatural bird in
the corner of the room. Once too I was driving with my grandmother
a little after dark close to the Channel that runs for some five
miles from Sligo to the sea, and my grandmother showed me the red
light of an outward-bound steamer and told me that my grandfather
was on board, and that night in my sleep I screamed out and
described the steamer’s wreck. The next morning my grandfather
arrived on a blind horse found for him by grateful passengers. He
had, as I remember the story, been asleep when the captain aroused
him to say they were going on the rocks. He said, “have you tried
sail on her?” and judging from some answer that the captain was
demoralised took over the command and, when the ship could not be
saved, got the crew and passengers into the boats. His own boat was
upset and he saved himself and some others by swimming; some women
had drifted ashore, buoyed up by their crinolines. “I was not so
much afraid of the sea as of that terrible man with his oar,” was
the comment of a schoolmaster who was among the survivors. Eight
men were, however, drowned and my grandfather suffered from that
memory at intervals all his life, and if asked to read family
prayers never read anything but the shipwreck of St. Paul.
