NATURE VERSUS HISTORY IN W. B. YEATS 105There 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 gray,
I hear it in the deep heart ’s core.Though Yeats’s yen for Innisfree (pronounced “Innishfree,” meaning Heather
Island) hasn’t much in common with the cabin Thoreau actually built on a pond
near Boston, he feels a kindred impulse to get away from society and revive
the spirit. As Thoreau says in Walden, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet
desperation.”
“I will arise and go now.” Knowingly or not, Yeats is echoing Robert Louis
Stevenson. In A Child’s Garden of Verses, “Travel” begins, “I should like to rise
and go /... Where below another sky / Parrot islands anchored lie.” Stevenson
himself had gone to Samoa in the South Seas, whence he wrote praising Yeats’s
“artful simplicity” in “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” He doesn’t mention the
borrowing. In any case, Yeats reaching toward an island “below another sky”
taps into childlike genius.
About poetry we often wonder, Does style drive content or vice-versa? The
answer is yes. “Innisfree” was Yeats’s first lyric with “my own music,” for music
means every bit as much as meaning here. An early draft even has noontide not
midnight “all a glimmer,” and midnight not noon “a purple glow” of heather!
Evidently the facts of nature must yield, to get him from “pavements gray” to
“lake water lapping.”
Happily for the music, Yeats recited “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” on the BBC,
an old man voicing a young man’s poem. “I am going to read my poems with
great emphasis upon the rhythm,” he announces. “It gave me a devil of a lot of
trouble to get [them] into verse, and that is why I willnot read them as if they
were prose.” We then hear a throaty resonant chant of weighted cadences and
Irish inflections: “Oy will uhroy-y-seond go now, ond go-o-o to Innishfree-e-e
.. .” Each stanza gets a startling music on the last word, raising the pitch for
“bee-loud gla-a-ade” and “linnet ’s wi-i-ings.” Then three stressed syllables
close the poem, “deep heart ’s core,” rising from a profundo “deep hahrt’s” to a
higher drawn-out tone on “caw-w-wr.” Poetry is not ordinary speech, it partakes
of inspiration, vision, oracle, carrying us from humdrum hereto a mythic there.
Yeats’s “there” itself resounds four times in six lines.
Civilization’s dream is to get away from it all to another place, classical Ar-
cadia, Coleridge ’s Xanadu, the “Country-green” of Keats’s nightingale. Yeats
goes into Celtic woods: