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had still the ambition, formed in Sligo
in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree.” Born in 1865,
rooted in west Ireland ’s County Galway, William Butler Yeats died shortly
before World War II broke out in 1939. Spanning the decades from Victorian
to modern, his poems took on every question: love, sexuality, transience, age,
death, local place and legend, mythic past and visionary future, nobility vis-à-vis
common folk, country and city, dreams and responsibilities, private as against
public, spiritual and earthly life, nature versus history. All this mattered in the
world at large and vitally in his craft. “Out of the quarrel with others we make
rhetoric,” he said, “of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”
One day in London, feeling homesick, Yeats suddenly remembered a small
island in a lake near Sligo, and Thoreau at Walden Pond. Published in 1892 (the
year John Muir founded California’s Sierra Club), “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”
springs from that Romantic yearning toward a distant mythic place.
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;“O honey bees, / Come build in the empty house
of the stare”
Nature Versus History in W. B. Yeats
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