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About this quote

What does it mean?
Yeats imagines London as haunted by lost souls walking its streets endlessly.
In plain terms
He thinks ghosts of lost people walk London.
What can you take from it?
Cities hold deep memories.

Where it applies

  • travel
  • grief
  • reflection

Putting it to work

  • writing
  • memory
  • observation

Questions to consider

  • Does a city remember?
  • Where are your ghosts?

Another view

It is a heavy view of a living city.

More from William Butler Yeats

  1. The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.

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  2. I wonder anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember, the place is so beautiful. One almost expects the people to sing instead of speaking. It is al…

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  3. I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness. They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal, - that is they have ceased…

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