ABSTRACT
He was subjected to childish disillusionment on the subject of sex; and the disgust arising from this reinforced the tendency towards fantasy. He sailed model yachts; this remained a passion with him, and with his painter brother. He acquired, through family and local legend, a dramatic sense of the supernatural. A seabird was the omen that announced death or danger to a Pollexfen.2 But his education was unhappy, calculated to produce instability and fear. 'The only lessons I had ever learned were those my father taught me, for he terrified me by descriptions of my moral degradation and he humiliated me by my likeness to disagreeable people.'3 And this uncertainty was reinforced by schooldays at a second-rate establishment in Hammersmith, 'an obscene bullying place', where he became acutely aware of the loss of social position which an Irish schoolboy might experience in an English school. In 1881, when the family returned to Ireland, he was at school in Dublin, where his father had a studio; and in 1884 he entered the Metropolitan School of Art, where he met George Russell and the two sculptors, John
Hughes and Oliver Sheppard, as well as a number of the younger Irish writers. His first poems, which included 'The Island of Statues', were published in the Dublin University Review of 188). The same year saw the foundation of the Hermetic Society, and Yeats' interest in esoteric practices - strongly disapproved by his father - was confirmed. He met 'the Brahmin', Mohini Chatterji, who came to Dublin as the representative of the Theosophical Society, and whose visit bore fruit long afterwards in the poem named after him.! The Indian romantic setting had traditional attractions for a young poet, and precedents in Shelley; it is used in the idylls of Crossways.
