William Butler Yeats

Wobble the gyre

Symbolist magic

An illustration of W.B. Yeats’s “gyre” as described in “A Vision.” Published in “A Brief Approach to W.B. Yeats’ Lunar System.”

Like a molecule when energy infuses it

Sublimate the symbol, the image

Reach through the punctum

Move from ground state to excited state and back again

Deep heart's core sound (PoemTalk #66)

W. B. Yeats, 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree'

William Butler Yeats in 1932

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Taije Silverman, Max McKenna, and John Timpane joined Al Filreis to discuss William Butler Yeats’s “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” [text], surely his most famous early poem (written in 1888; published in 1890) and a staple of his poetry readings into the 1930s. Yeats’s father had read Walden aloud to him; Thoreau’s pastoral simplification had been alluring for him as a teen, when he fantasized living on an uninhabited island in Lough Gill (near Sligo) — Innisfree. In the poem, the speaker, now longing for an orginary Ireland “while I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey” of the city (presumably London), expresses his desire to build a small cabin on the isle and, like Thoreau, to plant rows of beans and “have some peace there.”

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