ABSTRACT
The poem began in WBY's Journal (Burns Collection, Boston College), where it is first drafted at the head of fol. 42v. It is followed by a prose entry, then redrafted at the foot of the page. The Journal page is transcribed. in Mem., 196–197, and repr. and transcribed in Cornell ISWGH, 178–179. The poem was published in McClure's Magazine for Dec. 1910, and was published in the ‘Momentary Thoughts’ sequence of GH10. It was included in GH12, then again in R16, and subsequently in all collected edns. of WBY's poetry. It is true that ‘my youth’ is in this quatrain very definitely a thing of the past; and its ‘lying days’ are not treated with much generosity. Ezra Pound, more than ready to sympathize with any such lack of sympathy, nevertheless felt that WBY was being carried away with rhetoric here: he wrote how ‘Yeats burbles when he talks of ‘withering into the truth’: you wither into non-curiosity’.
