Rarely do I pick as well-known a poem as this one for my Thursday Short Poem offering. But I’m trying to go through favorite poems from different periods in my life. This was the first "adult" poem I loved; my mother read it to me first when I was six or seven, and it was surely the first grown-up verse I was able to understand. It was also the first poem I ever memorized, and it’s a good one to recite silently when one is feeling overwhelmed and tired and surrounded by pressure.
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 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.
I fell in love with the poem after hearing an old recording of Yeats reading it.
There’s also a beautiful sung version on new age artist Bill Douglas’s album Cantilena.
i’m sorry if this sounds morbid - i don’t mean it in that sense - but i have a strong sense that i will read this poem at my father’s funeral one day. i passed it along to him while studying irish lit in college, and having grown up on a lake himself, he has really taken a liking to it.
i think part of him just likes knowing a poem by a dead irish writer, but that’s ok too :)
anyway, nice choice…
It’s one of my favorite poems as well.
My brother killed himself three weeks ago. At the funeral I could not read the poem. I was too angry to talk of peace. But the Thirty (Jewish custom- 30 days after the burial the family goes back to the grave and the headstone is uncovered) is coming up, and I hope to be able to translate it into Hebrew and read it then.
My brother deserves the peace he so desperately wanted. And so do we.