The Poets' Corner

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by John Lithgow


  What wealth the show to me had brought:

  For oft, when on my couch I lie

  In vacant or in pensive mood,

  They flash upon that inward eye

  Which is the bliss of solitude;

  And then my heart with pleasure fills,

  And dances with the daffodils.

  What a splendid description of an accidental but perfectly believable phenomenon, happening upon a field of thousands of daffodils, at just the moment in spring when they lift their heads at once. And how Wordsworth savors this experience, coming once upon the thrilling beauty of nature, and recalling it later in a “bliss of solitude.” I have visited the Lake District in England—it is the most verdant landscape and really does evoke an ecstatic response to nature. It wells up in you, almost beyond your control.

  The poem has an almost childlike wonder, with the image of wandering “lonely as a cloud,” dancing and spinning in a sea of daffodils. No child I know could resist this notion. This is an almost perfect example of a Romantic poem—adoring of nature, elevated almost to a state of rapture, and in a language that rings true.

  Wordsworth defined poetry as the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquility.” When you measure this poem against that definition, you can imagine the process by which he wrote, his personal evolution as a poet sparking a revolution in English literature.

  Come forth into the light of things, Let Nature be your teacher.

  —William Wordsworth

  Surprised by joy

  Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind

  I turned to share the transport—Oh! with whom

  But Thee, deep buried in the silent tomb,

  That spot which no vicissitude can find?

  Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind—

  But how could I forget thee? Through what power,

  Even for the least division of an hour,

  Have I been so beguiled as to be blind

  To my most grievous loss?—That thought’s return

  Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore,

  Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn,

  Knowing my heart’s best treasure was no more;

  That neither present time, nor years unborn

  Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.

  William Butler Yeats

  The Nationalist

  (1865–1939)

  William Butler Yeats loved County Sligo, his childhood home in western Ireland. He also loved mythology and folklore. He was passionate about art, politics, and theater, but by far his greatest loves were Ireland—which, he wrote, “must be the subject-matter of my poetry”—and the beautiful actress and Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne. Yeats would later say of his first meeting with Gonne, that’s when “all of the trouble of my life began.”

  Yeats’s unrequited love for Maud Gonne was truly a love story for the ages. She helped him found the National Literary Society in Dublin but also repeatedly refused his marriage proposals. His involvement with Irish nationalism was inspired in part by Gonne, and she was a muse and a central figure in much of his poetry. A cultural leader as well as a major playwright (he was a founder of the Irish Literary Theatre and its director to the end of his life), he received the Nobel Prize for Literature for his dramatic works in 1923. Today he is more widely known as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, having written many of his major works after receiving the Nobel Prize.

  There are two periods of Yeats’s work: his early romantic period, which was much inspired by Percy Bysshe Shelley; and his modern period, where his poetry became leaner and more focused, influenced by Ezra Pound. Actively involved in Irish politics and reform, Yeats was a passionate, political, action-oriented man. Though this was sometimes at odds with the contemplative life of a poet, these two sides of himself came together in poems such as “September 1913” and “Easter 1916.” Yeats is buried in his beloved County Sligo, Ireland. Unable as he was to resist one last rallying cry, the epitaph at his gravesite is the last line from one of his final poems, “Under Ben Bulben”: “Cast a cold eye on life, on death; horseman, pass by!”

  Listen to Yeats read “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” at www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15529. It will go right to your bones.

  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 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 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.

  In his autobiography, Yeats wrote about the creation of “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”: “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.”

  What a longing poem. This is not just a bit of nostalgia; it’s a country boy’s lament—a deep, almost painful yearning to return to the simplicity and beauty of a life in his memory that is far away from the gray pavement of the life he leads now. It’s often a sound that triggers this kind of memory and longing in us, from a far-off train whistle to the call of a whip-poor-will to the “tinkle of water.” These sounds and the places they take us back to are comforting, but they also let loose that longing for what’s lost.

  I picture a man sitting at his desk in a high-rise office building, thinking of the place he loves most. I see him thinking of standing up, walking out the door, and going to this place and never coming back. “I will arise and go now”—it won’t really happen, but the man will imagine it again and again, as both a comfort and an ache he can’t get rid of.

  This poem was one of Yeats’s first great works and is perhaps one of the most personally resonant. He invokes the place called Innisfree for himself and for all of us, reminding us that the heart and imagination are always able to return to a place where the cricket sings.

  Favorite Poems

  “Leda and the Swan” “A Prayer for My Daughter”

  “Among School Children” “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”

  “September 1913”

  Sailing to Byzantium

  That is no country for old men. The young

  In one another’s arms, birds in the trees

  —Those dying generations—at their song,

  The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

  Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

  Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

  Caught in that sensual music all neglect

  Monuments of unageing intellect.

  An aged man is but a paltry thing,

  A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

  Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

  For every tatter in its mortal dress,

  Nor is there singing school but studying

  Monuments of its own magnificence;

  And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

  To the holy city of Byzantium.

  O sages standing in God’s holy fire

  As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

  Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

  And be the singing-masters of my soul.

  Consume my heart away; sick with desire

  And fastened to a dying animal

 
It knows not what it is; and gather me

  Into the artifice of eternity.

  Once out of nature I shall never take

  My bodily form from any natural thing,

  But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

  Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

  To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

  Or set upon a golden bough to sing

  To lords and ladies of Byzantium

  Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

  Permissions

  “Afternoon” from THE PORTABLE DOROTHY PARKER, edited by Brendan Gill. Copyright © 1928, renewed © 1956 by Dorothy Parker. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  “Birches” from THE POETRY OF ROBERT FROST, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright © 1923, 1969 by Henry Holt and Company. Copyright © 1951 by Robert Frost. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

  “Days” from COLLECTED POEMS by Philip Larkin. Copyright © 1988, 2003 by the Estate of Philip Larkin. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

  “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” from THE COMPLETE POEMS by Randall Jarrell. Copyright © 1969, renewed 1997 by Mary von S. Jarrell. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

  “Do not go gentle into that good night” from THE POEMS OF DYLAN THOMAS. Copyright © 1952 by Dylan Thomas. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

  “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” from THE COLLECTED POEMS OF WALLACE STEVENS. Copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens and renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

  “Filling Station” from THE COMPLETE POEMS 1927–1979 by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

  “Dream Song 76: Henry’s Confession” from THE DREAM SONGS by John Berryman. Copyright © 1969 by John Berryman. Copyright © renewed 1997 by Kate Donahue Berryman. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

  “if everything happens that can’t be done” from COMPLETE POEMS: 1904–1962 by E. E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage. Copyright © 1944, 1972, 1991 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.

  “If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso” by Gertrude Stein. Used by permission of the Estate of Gertrude Stein through its Literary Executor, Stanford Gann, Jr. of Levin & Gann, P.A.

  “Musèe des Beaux Arts” from COLLECTED POEMS by W. H. Auden. Copyright © 1940, renewed 1968 by W. H. Auden. Used by permission of Random House, Inc.

  “No Doctors Today, Thank You” by Ogden Nash. Copyright © 1942 by Ogden Nash, renewed. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.

  “Poetry” from THE POEMS OF MARIANNE MOORE, edited by Grace Schulman. Copyright © 2003 by Marianne Craig Moore, Executor of the Estate of Marianne Moore. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  “The Public Garden” from COLLECTED POEMS by Robert Lowell. Copyright © 2003 by Harriet Lowell and Sheridan Lowell. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

  “The Red Wheelbarrow,” “This Is Just to Say,” and “To a Poor Old Woman” from COLLECTED POEMS: 1909–1939, VOLUME I by William Carlos Williams. Copyright © 1938 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

  “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” from PERSONAE by Ezra Pound. Copyright © 1926 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

  “A Supermarket in California” from COLLECTED POEMS: 1947–1980 by Allen Ginsberg. Copyright © 1955 by Allen Ginsberg. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

  “The Weary Blues” from THE COLLECTED POEMS OF LANGSTON HUGHES. Copyright © 1994 by The Estate of Langston Hughes. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

  “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks. Copyright © 1950, 1959, 1960 by Gwendolyn Brooks. Reprinted by consent of Brooks Permissions.

 

 

 


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