Monday
Listening to the humming of our hummingbirds the other day, I thought of Yeats’s reference in “The Lake Isle of Inisfree” to linnet wings. I don’t think we have linnets in America and I can’t imagine that they make any sound at all, much less hummingbird buzzing. Still, Yeats conjures up images of feathery lightness at the magical twilight hour.
Late July is the perfect time to revisit Yeats’s poem, which envisions traveling to a rural island that glimmers and glows. As we ourselves live on the edge of a lake, I can vouch that “peace comes dropping slow.” Although we do not have many honey bees, we do have what are known locally as good news bees. Technically, they are yellowjacket hover flies, but unlike yellow jackets and honeybees they do not sting. They just comfortably buzz.
I’d never realized until this reflection how much Yeats’s poem owes to Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey. (I imagine my fellow English professors saying, “Duh!”) In Wordsworth’s poem, he is sitting in a lonely city room when he sees the bank of the Wye River in his mind’s eye, as though he is actually there:
These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration…
As Wordsworth puts it in his Lyrical Ballads preface, “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” Yeats too is recollecting in an urban setting:
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 is poetry at its most healing. Whether the poet goes to Inisfree in actuality or just in his imagination doesn’t matter. The poem is so vivid, aurally as well as visually, we feel we are there.
The Lake Isle of Insfree
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.
