Poetry Month: William Butler Yeats

I'm amazed that I've managed to retain my love and regard for Yeats' poetry. That's mostly because I was force-fed a steady diet of Yeats for about a year in college. I had a professor who was...um...rather obsessed with Yeats' work. We were required (yes, I did say required) to write our senior literary theses around Yeats. Every senior student of literature who wanted that B.A. had to write something about Yeats. Now to be fair, we had to compare or contrast or in some way relate Yeats to some other writer or movement that we had studied (I chose William Wordsworth). But we still had no choice but to incorporate Yeats in some way.

You might think that such devotion to one writer might have felt inspiring, but in many ways it felt stifling to me, at least at the time. As much as I did enjoy reading and even studying Yeats, I balked for a while about reading him on my own once I no longer "had" to. I guess this is an instance where someone who has a deep passion for something can come close to killing off potential passion in you just by virtue of their intensity.

But in recent years I have gone back to Yeats, or rather I've found him coming back to me. Certain poems (although not usually the ones we studied and analyzed to death) come sneaking back into my consciousness, and I do keep his work on my shelf for just those moments, the moments when I find myself longing for his music.

I even keep one Yeats poem on my wall. In fact, even during the years when I took an extended hiatus from reading anything else by Yeats, this poem stayed up. I've always loved it, for its lovely images and its musicality. In fact, when the sweet girl was a baby, I often would read the poem over and over while I nursed and rocked her, letting its sense of peace permeate my heart. Eventually, I created a tune for it so I could sing it to my little one. I still love to sing this poem.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

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 honeybee,
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 the water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

William Butler Yeats (1892)

There is something indescribably beautiful about this poem. The opening stanza makes me think of Celtic monks in their clay and wattle huts. The last two stanzas just seem soaked with peace and joy. Isn't it true that sometimes "peace comes dropping slow"? I love how Yeats incorporates both sight and sound to invoke that sense of peace and contentment, a sense that the poet carries with him, even when he is no longer physically present in that lovely "bee-loud glade." He carries it with him in his heart, and can call upon it even while he travels, even when he's in places filled with the dreariness of "pavements gray."