September 3 W B Yeats

Bees too provide the peaceful music of W. B. Yeats’ earthly paradise, as imagined in his “The Lake-Isle of Innisfree”:

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.

Lake-Isle

Next Poem: Scotland Small? by Hugh Macdiarmid