ABSTRACT
In ‘The Fisherman’ Yeats tells us that he began imagining, out of scorn of the Ireland of fact, his fisherman, climbing up to the mountain streams. It is a satisfaction to his mind to contemplate the solitude there. This was his ‘vision of reality’ even though, he says defiantly, the man was ‘but a dream’:
All day I’d looked in the face What I had hoped ‘twould be To write for my own race And the reality.3
