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.
- William Butler Yeats (1893)
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 (in London) 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.