The Lake Isle of Innisfree

 The Lake Isle of Innisfree

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

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.

This would have been in my sophomore year in some classroom in one of those red brick buildings that lined the quad, some dusty dead classroom.  They all seemed dusty, slow, boring.  Poetry, I never liked it much.  It was dusty too, dusty and arid and why were they making us learn this?  Eventually there would have to be a paper.  I hated writing papers.  I preferred tests.  You show up in a room and there are some questions on a paper and you answer them as best you can and you pass or fail, but in any case you are done with it.  But a paper, it's not done until you actually sit down and write it.

But I had to admit that this was sterner stuff than what went down in Mrs Stark's English class.  There was this wild one about a patient etherized on a table, and there was William Butler Yeats, a grey paperback terribly dog-eared now and aching to break loose of its spine and spread its leaves far and wide, still sitting across the room on my bookshelf.  

Kind of an odd guy, had some weird theory about how the world suffers some cataclysmic event every couple thousand years.  Had a wife who went under spells and spoke some arcane truths.  Was a firebrand for the Irish cause, writing of Fairies and Fenians while men died for a cause greater than them.

Had a way with words though.  I think he was writing about the early industrial revolution and its pavements grey while he longed for peace and quiet away from the strife, which makes you wonder why he was so passionate about the cause, but he is a poet, he can write whatever he wants.

I feel it in my deep heart's core was the line that got to me (though bee loud glade is no slouch), the way I felt bored and lonely in those dusty dead classrooms.  Not that I then, or ever in my life, have been a nature guy, but you know, I wanted to be somewhere else.

For a battered old paperback on the bottom shelf it comes into my mind fairly often.  It came to mind with Beagles' being tired of Ukraine and of covid and Old Dog with no radio, hardly any tv, and minimal computer time, reading about a faraway small town where evenings are likely full of the linnet's wings, and tending to his own bee-loud glade.

I would like to hear about the one egg omelet though.  The Rye Krisp sounds intriguing, but the one egg sounds awfully parsimonious.