01 yeats innisfree

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The Lake Isle of Innisfree

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The Lake Isle of Innisfree

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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;There 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 dayI 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.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

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The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.Letter to Frederick J. Gregg (1886)

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth. Letter to the Editor, Dublin Daily Express (1895)

…Now that my ladder’s gone,I must lie down where all the ladders startIn the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.The Circus Animals’ Desertion (1939)

…And how can body, laid in that white rush,But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?Leda and the Swan (1923)

In courtesy I’d have her chiefly learned;Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned…A Prayer for my Daughter (1921)

The significance of the ‘heart’ metaphor to Yeats…

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…Consume my heart away; sick with desireAnd fastened to a dying animalIt knows not what it is; and gather meInto the artifice of eternity.Sailing to Byzantium (1926)

Too long a sacrificeCan make a stone of the heart.Easter 1916

A pity beyond all tellingIs hid in the heart of love:The Pity of Love (1893)

All things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old,The cry of a child by the roadway, the creak of a lumbering cart,The heavy steps of the ploughman, splashing the wintry mould,Are wronging your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.The Lover Tells of the Rose in his Heart (1899)

Unwearied still, lover by lover,They paddle in the coldCompanionable streams or climb the air;Their hearts have not grown old. The Wild Swans at Coole (1916)

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An aged man is but a paltry thing,A tattered coat upon a stick, unlessSoul clap its hands and sing, and louder singFor every tatter in its mortal dress,Nor is there singing school but studyingMonuments of its own magnificence;And therefore I have sailed the seas and comeTo the holy city of Byzantium.Extract from Sailing to Byzantium (1926)

And the significance of ‘sailing’ as a metaphor to Yeats…

‘I am trying to write about the state of my soul, for it is right for an old man to make his soul, and some of my thoughts about that subject I have put into a poem called 'Sailing to Byzantium'. When Irishmen were illuminating the Book of Kells, and making the jewelled croziers in the National Museum, Byzantium was the centre of European civilization and the source of its spiritual philosophy, so I symbolize the search for the spiritual life by a journey to that city.’ WB Yeats, 1931

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‘I planned to live some day in a cottage on a little island called Innisfree…I should live, as Thoreau lived, seeking wisdom.’ WB Yeats, Autobiographies, 1927.

‘Sometimes I told myself very adventurous love-stories withmyself for hero, and at other times I planned out a life of lonely austerity,and at other times mixed the ideals and planned a life oflonely austerity mitigated by periodical lapses. I had still the ambition,formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreauon Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walkingthrough Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of waterand saw a fountain in a shop-window which balanced a little ballupon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the suddenremembrance came my poem `Innisfree', 16 my first lyric with anythingin its rhythm of my own music..’ WB Yeats, Interview with the BBC, 1927.

Later explanation as to how he came to write the poem…

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In March 1845, a friend told Thoreau, "Go out upon that, build yourself a hut, & there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive. I see no other alternative, no other hope for you.“Two months later, Thoreau embarked on a two-year experiment in simple living when he moved to a small, self-built house on land in a forest around the shores of Walden Pond. The house was in "a pretty pasture and woodlot" of 14 acres.

Henry David Thoreau, June 1856

Thoreau left Walden Pond on September 6, 1847. Over several years, he worked to pay off his debts and also continuously revised his manuscript for what, in 1854, he would publish as Walden, or Life in the Woods, recounting the two years, two months, and two days he had spent at Walden Pond. The book compresses that time into a single calendar year, using the passage of four seasons to symbolize human development. Part memoir and part spiritual quest, Walden at first won few admirers, but later critics have regarded it as a classic American work that explores natural simplicity, harmony, and beauty as models for just social and cultural conditions.

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‘I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.’Henry David Thoreau, Walden, ‘Where I Lived, and What I Lived For.’ (1854)

From the introduction to the text explaining Thoreau’s reasons…

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Here, in this courageous New Englander's refusal to pay his taxes and his choice of jail rather than support a war that would spread slavery's territory into Mexico, I made my first contact with the theory of nonviolent resistance. Fascinated by the idea of refusing to cooperate with an evil system, I was so deeply moved that I reread the work several times.

I became convinced that non co-operation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is co-operation with good. No other person has been more eloquent and passionate in getting this idea across than Henry David Thoreau. As a result of his writings and personal witness, we are the heirs of a legacy of creative protest. The teachings of Thoreau came alive in our civil rights movement; indeed, they are more alive than ever before. Whether expressed in a sit-in at lunch counters, a freedom ride into Mississippi, a peaceful protest in Albany, Georgia, a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, these are outgrowths of Thoreau's insistence that evil must be resisted and that no moral man can patiently adjust to injustice.

Martin Luther King, Jr

Who else has Thoreau influenced?

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...No familiar shapes Remained, no pleasant images of trees,Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields;But huge and mighty forms, that do not live Like living men, moved slowly through the mind By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.

I dipped my oars into the silent lake,And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boatWent heaving through the water like a swan;When, from behind that craggy steep till thenThe horizon's bound, a huge peak, black and huge,As if with voluntary power instinct,Upreared its head. I struck and struck again, And growing still in stature the grim shape Towered up between me and the stars, and still, For so it seemed, with purpose of its own And measured motion like a living thing, Strode after me…. The Prelude Book I

Extracts from William Wordsworth’s ‘The Prelude’ Book I, 1850.

Who else influenced Yeats?

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The immeasurable height Of woods decaying, never to be decayed, The stationary blasts of waterfalls, And in the narrow rent at every turn Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn, The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky, The rocks that muttered close upon our ears, Black drizzling crags that spake by the way-side As if a voice were in them, the sick sightAnd giddy prospect of the raving stream, The unfettered clouds and region of the Heavens, Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light– Were all like workings of one mind, the featuresOf the same face, blossoms upon one tree; Characters of the great Apocalypse, The types and symbols of Eternity, Of first, and last, and midst, and without end. ‘The Prelude’, Book VI

Yes, I remember when the changeful earth, And twice five summers on my mind had stampedThe faces of the moving year, even then I held unconscious intercourse with beauty Old as creation, drinking in a pure Organic pleasure from the silver wreaths Of curling mist, or from the level plain Of waters coloured by impending clouds. ‘The Prelude’, Book I

….the cry of unknown birds;The mountains more by blackness visibleAnd their own size, than any outward light;The breathless wilderness of clouds; the clockThat told, with unintelligible voice, The widely parted hours; the noise of streams,And sometimes rustling motions nigh at hand,That did not leave us free from personal fear; ‘The Prelude’, Book VI

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…And I have feltA presence that disturbs me with the joyOf elevated thoughts; a sense sublimeOf something far more deeply interfused,Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,And the round ocean and the living air,And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;A motion and a spirit, that impelsAll thinking things, all objects of all thought,And rolls through all things.

These beauteous forms,Through a long absence, have not been to meAs is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:But oft, in lonely rooms, and ’mid the dinOf towns and cities, I have owed to them,In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;And passing even into my purer mindWith tranquil restoration:—feelings tooOf unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,As have no slight or trivial influenceOn that best portion of a good man’s life,His little, nameless, unremembered, actsOf kindness and of love.

Extracts from William Wordsworth’s ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey, July 1798.’

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Wordsworth got his idea of the sublime as it was developed by the writer Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756). Burke was the first philosopher to argue that the sublime and the beautiful are mutually exclusive. The imagination is moved to awe and instilled with a degree of fear by what is ‘dark, uncertain, and confused.’ While the relationship of the sublime and the beautiful is one of mutual exclusiveness, either one can produce pleasure. The sublime may inspire fear, but one receives pleasure in knowing that the perception is a largely a fiction.

‘The sublime’ in poetry and literature…

The feeling Wordsworth expresses is beyond rational understanding; it is a feeling of the sublime, of all the grandeur and divinity in the natural world. It’s a state of being that transcends the mundane and mechanical world in which we live. For the Romantics, it represented the longing to be free. But the sublime was more than just the beauty of a sunset, it was about awe and terror…The sublime is man lost in the immensity of nature.– Peter Ackroyd

Is The Lake Isle of Innisfree about awe and terror? Is it ‘the sublime’ that Yeats is searching for?

Watch the extracts from the series on the Romantics here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rja9-CLj0hg&feature=relatedYou’re looking for the episodes (wrongly labelled) Eternity, parts 3 and 4.

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Or is Yeats after something simpler?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p003c1cs

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss pastoral literature and to what extent does it represent a continuous yearning for a non-existent Golden Age of Innocence? How far did it evolve to reflect the social and political preoccupations of its times and what were the real meanings of its much used metaphors of town and country?

Come live with me and be my love, And we will all the pleasures prove That valleys, groves, hills, and fields, Woods or steepy mountain yields.And we will sit upon the rocks, Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks, By shallow rivers to whose falls Melodious birds sing madrigals.

An entreaty from Christopher Marlowe's Passionate Shepherd to His Love - thought by many to be the crowning example of Elizabethan pastoral poetry. The traditions of pastoral poetry, literature and drama can be traced back to the third century BC and have principally offered a conventionalised picture of rural life, the naturalness and innocence of which is seen to contrast favourably with the corruption and artificialities of city and court life. Pastoral literature deals with tensions between nature and art, the real and the ideal, the actual and the mythical, and although pastoral works have been written from the point of view of shepherds, they have often been penned by highly sophisticated, urban poets.

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http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=1689

http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=1688

http://www.bbc.co.uk/poetryseason/poets/wb_yeats.shtml

http://www.nli.ie/yeats/

http://poetryx.com/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9LelXa3U_I#t=15m35s

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Butler_Yeats

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&v=beQdcwTqcyU&NR=1