Four Years

Four Years

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Title: Four Years
Author: William Butler Yeats
Release Date: November, 2004 [EBook #6865] [Yes, we are more than
one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on February 2,

2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English
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FOUR YEARS
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS.

FOUR YEARS 1887-1891.
At the end of the eighties my father and mother, my brother and sisters
and myself, all newly arrived from Dublin, were settled in Bedford
Park in a red-brick house with several wood mantlepieces copied from
marble mantlepieces by the brothers Adam, a balcony, and a little
garden shadowed by a great horse-chestnut tree. Years before we had
lived there, when the crooked, ostentatiously picturesque streets, with
great trees casting great shadows, had been anew enthusiasm: the
Pre-Raphaelite movement at last affecting life. But now exaggerated
criticism had taken the place of enthusiasm; the tiled roofs, the first in
modern London, were said to leak, which they did not, & the drains to
be bad, though that was no longer true; and I imagine that houses were
cheap. I remember feeling disappointed because the co-operative stores,
with their little seventeenth century panes, were so like any common
shop; and because the public house, called 'The Tabard' after Chaucer's

Inn, was so plainly a common public house; and because the great sign
of a trumpeter designed by Rooke, the Pre- Raphaelite artist, had been
freshened by some inferior hand. The big red-brick church had never
pleased me, and I was accustomed, when I saw the wooden balustrade
that ran along the slanting edge of the roof, where nobody ever walked
or could walk, to remember the opinion of some architect friend of my
father's, that it had been put there to keep the birds from falling off.
Still, however, it had some village characters and helped us to feel not
wholly lost in the metropolis. I no longer went to church as a regular
habit, but go I sometimes did, for one Sunday morning I saw these
words painted on a board in the porch: 'The congregation are requested
to kneel during prayers; the kneelers are afterwards to be hung upon
pegs provided for the purpose.' In front of every seat hung a little
cushion, and these cushions were called 'kneelers.' Presently the joke
ran through the community, where there were many artists, who
considered religion at best an unimportant accessory to good
architecture and who disliked that particular church.

II
I could not understand where the charm had gone that I had felt, when
as a school-boy of twelve or thirteen, I had played among the
unfinished houses, once leaving the marks of my two hands, blacked by
a fall among some paint, upon a white balustrade. Sometimes I thought
it was because these were real houses, while my play had been among
toy-houses some day to be inhabited by imaginary people full of the
happiness that one can see in picture books. I was in all things
Pre-Raphaelite. When I was fifteen or sixteen, my father had told me
about Rossetti and Blake and given me their poetry to read; & once in
Liverpool on my way to Sligo, "I had seen 'Dante's Dream' in the
gallery there--a picture painted when Rossetti had lost his dramatic
power, and to-day not very pleasing to me--and its colour, its people,
its romantic architecture had blotted all other pictures away." It was a
perpetual bewilderment that my father, who had begun life as a
Pre-Raphaelite painter, now painted portraits of the first comer,
children selling newspapers, or a consumptive girl with a basket offish

upon her head, and that when, moved perhaps by memory of