Waxing Poetic: The Lake Isle of Innisfree by William Butler Yeats

     William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was an Anglo-Irish poet and playwright.  He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival.  When Yeats was only two, his family moved to London, but he spent much of his childhood and school holidays in Sligo with his grandparents.  This country, its scenery, folklore, and supernatural legends colored Yeat's work and became the setting for much of his poetry. 
     "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" is one of his earlier poems.  In his youth, his father read to him from Thoreau's Walden and he dreamed of living someday in a cottage on the little island of Innisfree in Lough Gill, County Sligo.  According to Yeats:

     I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop-window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water.  From the sudden remembrance came my poem Innisfree, my first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music.  I had begun to loosen rhythm as an escape from rhetoric and from that emotion of the crowd that rhetoric brings, but I only understood vagely and accasionally that I must for my special purpose sue nothing but the common syntax.
 
     Inspired by Walden - hence the bean-rows:  "I came to love my rows, my beans, though so many more than I wanted.  They attached me to the earth and so I got strength like Antaeus." (From Walden by Henry David Thoreau)
     I love this poem.  Haven't we all dreamed of a peaceful place apart from the hustle and bustle of the world - a place to live simply and close to nature?

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 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.