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We cannot resist the pleasure of quoting here from his "Innisfree", which won the praise of Robert Louis Stevenson, and which, if not the high mark of Yeats's achievement, is still a flawless thing in its way: 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.
It was apparently while he was living in Sligo, not far from the lakes, that he conceived the longing which he afterwards expressed with such originality of charm in The Lake Isle of Innisfree: My father had read to me some passage out of Walden, and I planned to live some day in a cottage on a little island called Innisfree....
"Nine bean-rows will I have there," cries Mr Yeats in describing his Utopia in The Lake Isle of Innisfree. I have only two. They run east to west between the second-early potatoes and the red-currant bushes. They are broad beans. They are in flower just now, and every flower is a little black-and-white butterfly. That, however, is the good side of the account.
The most striking characteristic of Yeats's work is the pensive yearning for a spiritual love, for an unchecked joy, and an unchanging peace beyond what mortal life can give. The very spirit of Celtic poetry is seen in these lines from The Lake Isle of Innisfree:
I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop window which balanced a little ball upon its jet and began to remember lake water.
Those who have read the first draft of Innisfree will remember how it gives one the impression of a new imagination stumbling into utterance. Mr. Yeats has laboured his verse into perfect music with a deliberateness like that of Flaubert in writing prose. Reveries is the beautiful and fascinating story of his childhood and youth, and the development of his genius.
a glimmering girl With apple blossom in her hair, Who called me by my name and ran And faded through the brightening air. What a sense of long pursuit, of a life's quest, we get in the exquisite last verse a verse which must be among the best-known of Mr. Yeats's writings after The Lake Isle of Innisfree and Had I the Heaven's Embroidered Cloths:
From the sudden remembrance came my poem 'Innisfree, my first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music. I had begun to loosen rhythm as an escape from rhetoric, and from that emotion of the crowd that rhetoric brings, but I only understood vaguely and occasionally that I must, for my special purpose, use nothing but the common syntax.
"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." He murmured the words over softly to himself. The emotion that produced Innisfree passed strongly through him. He too would be over the hills and far away.
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