Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at rrbates1951@gmail.com. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.
Wednesday
These hot and humid August days are the time when (to cite three cities I know something about) New Yorkers head to Maine, Parisians sets out for southern countryside, and the citizens of Ljubljana head for the Alps or the Dalmatia coast. For his part, W. B. Yeats dreams of “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.”
When I revisited this well-loved poem, I was startled to discover something that I’m sure many have noted but that I was only seeing for the first time. Yeats appears to be responding directly to William Wordsworth’s Romantic classic “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey.”
Wordsworth is revisiting a site he remembers from five years before. In the intervening time, he says, memories of the place have come back to him so that he sees them as though they are actually there, not just there as a blind man would remember a landscape from the days when he could still see. When the poet is feeling weary and depressed, he returns to this memory and is restored:
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
The reference to “din of towns and cities” came to mind as I was reading “Innisfree,” with Yeats standing “on the roadway, or on the pavements grey” as he imagines the sanctuary. Here’s the poem:
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.
In “Tintern Abbey,” at the end of the stanza about beauteous mental forms Wordsworth talks about becoming “a living soul” that can “see into the life of things. This, I think, is what Yeats is expressing as he talks about always hearing, in his deep heart’s core, the lake water lapping. Here’s Wordsworth describing where the feelings generated by the memory take him:
Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
Both poets are telling us that, even if you’re stuck in the city, you’re not really stuck. You can travel to Innisfree in your mind.
