“While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.”From The Lake Isle of Innisfree, by W.B. Yeats
There is a scene in Brexit: The Uncivil War where Benedict Cumberbatch (playing Vote Leave director Dominic Cummings) falls to his knees, puts his ear to the ground and, with an intense and quizzical look, speaks to camera: “The noise is getting louder. What does it mean? What is it trying to tell us?”
This scene offers the correct imagery for our moment. It conveys Britain’s dominant emotion, the same emotion sketched by Yeats in The Lake Isle of Innisfree. Yearning. We are yearning for something. What is it?
For Yeats, the object of his desire is simple: it is his childhood home and the balm of the natural world, so distant from the “pavements grey”. Not everyone shares this particular form of yearning. Many have worked hard to get as far away from their roots as possible. Some studiously avoid nature.
