Though we were given the choice to write about whatever we wanted to in terms of Yeats’s poems, I still knew I wanted to go explore a place in Ireland. Why? Because nature is everything. This earth, as we know it, is the basis of inspiration for just about every single person that exists in this life. Without earth, there is nothing.
So I decided I would want to go explore a place that Yeats wrote about. And what better than a secluded island, Innisfree, that the poet grew up visiting and enjoying his youth at? In Yeats’s poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” we can easily imagine ourselves sitting at the island besides Yeats while he writes about wanting to get up and leave everything for the simple life. He nostalgically writes,
“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” (1-4)
Yeats imagines a life where he can simply harvest beans and honey while being neatly tucked into the isolated life of this isle. However, the reiteration in the first line really makes one think if he has truly gotten up and left to Innisfree, or rather if he is stuck in a daydream about being able to leave the urban life and go to Innisfree. Nonetheless, it’s a feeling we can all relate to, and it’s bittersweet to be able to write about a place so beautiful and peaceful yet so impossible to achieve as reality even if that is what we really want.
The fact that you were still drawn to visit someplace in nature this week was really relatable because that has been my favorite part about this course so far! I think it’s interesting that the lines from “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” that you discuss are the ones where he expresses to go be amongst nature which is the very thing you set out to do in your virtual travels this week as well.