Anyone who has read Yeats's wonderful Autobiography will remember his Sligo—shabby, shadowed, half country and half sea, full of confused romance, superstition, poverty, eccentricity, unrecognized anachronism, passion and ignorance and the little boy's misery. Yeats was treated well but was bitterly unhappy; he prayed that he would die, and used often to say to himself: When you are grown up, never talk as grown-up people do of the happiness of childhood.
The Development of Yeats's Sense of Reality, p. 89 - Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
