Tuesday Poem - 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' by W. B. Yeats

The Lake Isle of 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 noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the 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 gray,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

This was one of the poems I learnt that first year of learning poems. I love the agrarian romanticism that's expressed in it and the specificity of what is needed for a simple life - nine bean rows, a hive for the honey bee...I love the sounds at the poem's centre, the slowed-down life of contemplation  echoed in those lovely evocations of a tangible peace.

I'm currently in Brisbane - the city I grew up in. If there's ever a time for nostalgia it's when you return somewhere you spent those difficult years between childhood and adulthood. Passing a couple leaning into each other on a park bench this morning, I remembered that intensity - when the world stops with you, holds its breath as you fall in love and kiss. So really, I should have posted a love poem here. Although 'Lake Isle of Innisfree' is a love poem - to an idea, a place and a time. Maybe I should write a love poem to Brisbane and my younger self?

The Year of Learning Poems

About five weeks ago I started to memorise one poem each week. It occured to me that it would be interesting to document what this is teaching me about poetry.

My first choice was 'The Wild Swans at Coole'by W B Yeats on the grounds that more traditional poetry would be easier to memorise than free verse. Ive now learnt (in order):
The Wild Swans at Coole - W B Yeats
Lake Isle of Innisfree - W B Yeats
To Helen - Edgar Allen Poe
The Song of the Nomad Flute - W S Merwin
Good Night - W S Merwin
The Musee des Beaux Artes - W H Auden
Poem for a Hard Time - Lorna Crozier

What interested me today was how many of my favourite poems from a few years back didn't seem to merit learning by heart. They were too personal, sometimes, too much about the poet's life without those little ripples towards my own experiences. They were too clunky or wooden and I couldn't hear myself enjoying saying them aloud as I walked the dogs. They were too easy - leaving no room to contemplate the exact meaning the poet intended as with Merwin's The Song of the Nomad Flue - or tried too hard and therefore lacked the beautiful plainess of Lorna Crozier's 'Poem for a Hard Time'.

It can be riskier for a poet to rely on simplicity - on solid concrete images as Crozier does, or on a melodious repetition of plain monosyllabic words; night, dark, love, sleep, as Merwin does in 'Good Night' than to construct dazzling word scaffolds which take us up and up but lead nowhere.

Next poem I want to learn will be by Anne Sexton - a poet whose risk-taking was in her own self-mythologising as much as it was in her pile-up of imagery. I love Sexton's work and I'll be interested to see if it sings out to me in this context, which, by it's very nature of mindful repetition, reveals all a poem's bumps and blemishes - as well as their gorgeous bones.