2/24/2023 0 Comments Wandering willows fabric![]() ![]() ![]() While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore I will arise and go now, for always night and day There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee Īnd I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,ĭropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,Īnd a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made: This countryside, the lake and its islands, this composition of greens and grays and blues, was fused within him. He had spent his childhood in County Sligo before moving to Dublin and then London. ![]() It is filled with a romantic longing for the past: the Irish past, the mythic past and also Yeats’s own. “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” is a young man’s poem, written when he was 23. “He woke every morning certain that in the new day before him something would happen that had never happened before.” “For him, every day he lived was a new adventure,” she once told the Yeats scholar Curtis B. As she essentially said after his death, she saw the shimmer of his soul. He spent decades in love with the Irish nationalist and proto-feminist Maud Gonne after she rejected his marriage proposal for a final time, he shifted his attention to her daughter.Ī few weeks after she, in turn, spurned his marriage offer, he proposed to another woman, Georgie Hyde-Lees, who, despite knowing where she ranked, became his devoted life partner. He would forget to eat, or put food in the oven and let it burn. ![]() Yeats, born in 1865, the son of an artist, was a childlike intellectual. For decades, this place had reverberated in my mind now I was actually there. I got out on the dock, sat cross-legged facing the island, and let the wind say what it had to say. A farmhouse with a couple of S.U.V.s parked outside stood nearby, and there was a little concrete dock jutting out into the lake, pointed almost directly at Innisfree a few hundred yards away. I could barely make my way out to the water to get a view, so thick was the shoreline with trees and brush. When I reached the lakeshore, I found the opposite of a tourist site. William Butler Yeats wrote longingly of the Irish island Innisfree when he was a young man of just 23. There are Innisfree cosmetics, an Innisfree Eau de Parfum, an Innisfree B&B, an Innisfree Hotel and a Rose of Innisfree tour boat that does the lake. Thanks to the popularity of the poem (voted by readers of The Irish Times in 1999 as their all-time favorite work of Irish poetry), “Innisfree” is a bit of a brand. It would be a four-hour detour from the research I was doing for an article, but I had not the slightest doubt the journey would be worthwhile. A few years ago, I found myself in Dublin and decided to do it for real: go to Innisfree. Yeats named the poem after an actual place, an island in the middle of Lough Gill, a lake that spreads itself languidly across five miles of furiously green landscape in County Sligo in northwest Ireland. …Īnd I’m off, not to the dentist or the shopping mall but, mentally, striding emerald slopes, making for a place of myth. I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree. Somehow William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” which, like millions of other people, I first read in college, stays rooted in me: Surprisingly often, when I get up from a chair to leave a room, those six melodramatic words will unfurl in my mind. ![]()
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