2023-11-22 10:02:09
In London, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats suffered a severe attack of homesickness at the age of 23. In the window of a liquor store he saw an advertising fountain with a small wooden ball dancing on the fountain, and he was immediately drawn away by all the heart strings. “From the gray pavement” thoughts flew to County Sligo on the west coast of Ireland and to the rippling waters of Lough Gill. He dreamed of a cabin on Innisfree, an islet in the lake, of “nine rows of beans” that he wanted to plant there, a “hive of bees,” and the peace “that drips from the veils of the morning.”
This is how the young Yeats wrote his famous poem “The Sea Island of Innisfree”, and you have to hear the old Yeats in a crackling, grinding BBC recording from 1932, his breathless, organ sing-song in which this flight of thought begins: “I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree. . .”
#Nobel #Prize #winners #Yeats #Seamus #Heaney #Ireland