The Lake Isle
The Lake Isle - meaning Summary
Escape from Literary Labour
The speaker addresses deities, pleading for a small tobacco-shop and its modest comforts as an alternative to the exhausting profession of writing. He imagines neat boxes, loose tobacco, scales and chatty customers, valuing simple, corporeal tasks over the constant mental labor his current career requires. The poem frames escape as a yearning for mundane routine and social ease rather than fame or wealth.
Read Complete AnalysesO God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves, Give me in due time, I beseech you, a little tobacco-shop, With the little bright boxes piled up neatly upon the shelves And the loose fragment cavendish and the shag, And the bright Virginia loose under the bright glass cases, And a pair of scales not too greasy, And the votailles dropping in for a word or two in passing, For a flip word, and to tidy their hair a bit. O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves, Lend me a little tobacco-shop, or install me in any profession Save this damn'd profession of writing, where one needs one's brains all the time.
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