Ten years ago, Sal and I had a weekend break in Knock in County Mayo, Ireland, during which we took a pleasant side trip to Sligo and “Yeats country”. In those days I was into “collecting” literary graves and we took the opportunity to visit Yeats’ final resting place, which turned out to be situated in a glorious setting at Drumcliff, under the imposing Benbulbin rock formation. William Butler Yeats was of course one of the foremost twentieth century English language poets, and in Sligo they’re rightly proud of him.
I confess to not having read much Yeats, but there are two of his poems in particular that have resonated with me from old. One is his evocative rendering of the Greek myth, Leda and the Swan, and the other is this, the twelve-line lyric poem, The Lake Isle of Innisfree.
Yeats wrote The Lake Isle of Innisfree in 1888 when he was a young man, living in London and feeling lonely and homesick. The 1880s had seen the rise of Charles Stewart Parnell and the home rule movement in Ireland and developments there had had a profound effect on Yeats’ poetry, informed by his subsequent explorations of Irish identity. The Lake Isle of Innisfree is about a yearning for his childhood home (the isle of Innisfree is a real place, an uninhabited island in Lough Gill, where Yeats spent many of his childhood summers). It is a place of serenity and simplicity, and to we, the reader, that place becomes not Innisfree, but wherever we happen to picture our own rural hideaway; the place to which we pretend we shall one day escape and leave behind our current manic, urban lives (“on the pavement grey”).
The Lake Isle represents an escape, a poet’s vision of a romantic, idyllic, and timeless way of life. I love the way he evokes the tranquil life, in the bosom of nature, in that masterfully simple phrase wherein he says he will “live alone in the bee-loud glade”. How effectively this conjures up a picture of a hot sunny day alive with the hum of insects!
Of course, such an ambition rarely comes to pass and it remains for most of us a fanciful idea. Indeed, Yeats died in France and only returned to Sligo in a coffin. But his poem remains a great favourite with the Irish (it’s quoted in Irish passports) and to romantics everywhere who yearn for tranquillity and “hear it in the deep heart’s core”.
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
