Chiswick Eyot

Location 9

Chiswick Eyot
Chiswick Eyot (pronounced ‘Eight’), left, reminded Yeats of the island in Lough Gill near Sligo which inspred him to write ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’

Yeats spent much of the summer of 1888, his first year back in Chiswick, walking along the Thames river bank. We know, because “John Sherman”, that young London-Irish exile in Yeats’s novel of the same name, spends a great deal of time here, being reminded of a river near his home in Ballah, a town very like Yeats’s mother’s home town of Sligo, where he’d spent so many summers.

Here’s how Yeats describes one of John Sherman’s summer days by the river:

He was set dreaming a whole day by walking down one Sunday morning to the border of the Thames — a few hundred yards from his house — & looking at the osier-covered Chiswick Eyot.

It made him remember an old day-dream of his. The source of the river that passed his garden at home was a certain wood-bordered & islanded lake, whither in childhood he had often gone blackberry-gathering. At the further end was a little islet called Innisfree…

We can imagine Yeats, spurred by such memories, walking the “few hundred yards” back to Blenheim Road and rushing upstairs to write “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”.

But another famous poem Yeats wrote that summer, owes its completion to the osier-covered Chiswick Eyot and the osiers along the tow path as he’d walk — as John Sherman did — from here to Putney and back by Hammersmith, Upper Mall and Kelmscott House.

Osiers, which are a form of willow, were needed for basket-making, and furniture, and in the West of England and Ireland, as withies to hold down thatched roofs. And every town, and country manor, had its willow gardens for that reason. Which also, because of their drooping greenery, were the ideal place for lovers’ trysts, and appear in folks songs such as “Down by the Willow Gardens”. Except that in Ireland the willow is known as “salley”, from saileach in Irish, derived from salix in Latin.

And so Yeats, in that summer, dreaming of the West of Ireland, and just as he had made dramas out of the lives of ordinary people, took a snatch of a folksong and added his own story of love and loss, of a young man who didn’t know you can’t hurry love, and who, perhaps recognising his own determination to succeed, needed to be told to take life easy too.

Hear Ciarán Hinds read the poem ‘Down by the Salley Gardens’:

Down by the Salley Gardens

Down by the salley gardens
     my love and I did meet;
She passed the salley gardens
     with little snow-white feet.
She bid me take love easy,
     as the leaves grow on the tree;
But I, being young and foolish,
     with her would not agree.

In a field by the river
     my love and I did stand,
And on my leaning shoulder
     she laid her snow-white hand.
She bid me take life easy,
     as the grass grows on the weirs;
But I was young and foolish,
     and now am full of tears.

Painting of Chiswick Eyot by Eric Ravilious
“River Thames, Chiswick Eyot” by Eric Ravilious (1903-1942) who lived at 48 Upper Mall (1931-1935) between Kelmscott House and Chiswick Eyot — here osiers, a species of small willow or salley, are being coppiced for withies to make baskets
Willow tree
Willow (or salley) gardens, green bushes and shady groves feature in so many songs as trysting places for young lovers, as in Yeats’ song, ‘Down by the Salley Gardens’