XII


I had 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 & 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