WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) is considered one of Ireland's greatest poets. Born in Dublin, he spent much of his boyhood with his grandparents in County Sligo in western Ireland. In 1987 his family moved to London where he wrote poems, plays, novels and short stories. Much of what he wrote was about Ireland, its landscape and myths. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize.

One of his best loved poems is "The Lake of Innisfree." For Yeats, the image was what started a poem. He wrote that a window display in London triggered his famous poem:

"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. From this sudden remembrance came my poem Innisfree, my first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music." 

THE LAKE AT INNISFREE

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 honeybee,

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 moon a purple glow,

And evening full of 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.

        by Willian Butler Yeats

        from THE ROSE (1893)