William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) is reported to have come to loathe “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” Given time and enough repeat performances, artists often learn to despise their greatest hits. Of all Yeats’s poems, this was the one people exhorted him to read aloud. Though he had the sort of reading voice that even he might have listened to all night with pleasure, still it’s not implausible that he might have tired of the sound of himself beginning, yet again, “I shall arise and go now, and go to Innisfree . . .”  

On the other hand, it’s also no surprise that of all his poems, this is the poem people wanted to hear. It’s a feel-good poem of the highest order, a poem that imagines a peace and goodness that can’t possibly exist in a fallen world. Yet for most of its twelve lines, the place does exist, shining and almost reachable, in the evocative liquid sounds of its hexameter lines, dropping to tetrameter at the end of each abab quatrain. There’s a quality in these longer lines of, simultaneously, languor and urgency: the timelessness of the place, the exiled speaker’s yearning to get there.   

Can such a place exist? Not really. This poem, despite its maker’s dyspepsic later opinion of it, saves itself from the total poisoning of nostalgia in its last lines. This Innisfree is real, but only in one man’s “deep heart’s core,” where he carries the memory of it. It exists, but nowhere in external reality. You might want to arise and go, and go to Innisfree, but you can’t get there from here.

This theme of place and memory brackets our Poem of the Day offerings this week. On Friday, Edna St. Vincent Millay will parry Yeats with a more bitterly un-nostalgic account of a remembered place.  

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. 

___________________________________________ 

With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.