Waxing Poetic: The Summer Rain by Henry David Thoreau

   The Summer Rain

My books I'd fain cast off, I cannot read,
'Twixt every page my thoughts go stray at large
Down in the meadow, where is richer feed,
And will not mind to hit their proper targe.
Plutarch was good, and so was Homer too,
Our Shakespeare's life were rich to live again,
What Plutarch read, that was not good nor true,
Nor Shakespeare's books, unless his books were men.

Here while I lie beneath this walnut bough,
What care I for the Greeks or for Troy town,
If juster battles are enacted now
Between the ants upon this hummock's crown?

Bid Homer wait till I the issue learn,
If red or black the gods will favor most,
Or yonder Ajax will the phalanx turn,
Struggling to heave some rock against the host.

Tell Shakespeare to attend some leisure hour,
For now I've business with this drop of dew,
And see you not, the clouds prepare a shower--
I'll meet him shortly when the sky is blue.

This bed of herd's grass and wild oats was spread
Last year with nicer skill than monarchs use.
A clover tuft is pillow for my head,
And violets quite overtop my shoes.

And now the cordial clouds have shut all in,
And gently swells the wind to say all's well;
The scattered drops are falling fast and thin,
Some in the pool, some in the flower-bell.

I am well drenched upon my bed of oats;
But see that globe come rolling down its stem,
Now like a lonely planet there it floats,
And now it sinks into my garment's hem.

Drip drip the trees for all the country round,
And richness rare distills from every bough;
The wind alone it is makes every sound,
Shaking down crystals on the leaves below.

For shame the sun will never show himself,
Who could not with his beams e'er melt me so;
My dripping locks--they would become an elf,
Who in a beaded coat does gayly go.

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.