Where none has reigned that lacked a name and fame Great rooms where travelled men and children found Old Marble heads, old pictures everywhere The poem was first published as “Coole Park and Ballylee” in the 1932 volume Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems, but was shortened to “Coole and Ballylee” in the 1933 edition of The Winding Stair and Other Poems.Īnd, like the soul, it sails into the sightĪnd in the morning’s gone, no man knows why įrom somebody that toils from chair to chair īeloved books that famous hands have bound, The tape ends with a pair of recordings from 1937: another reading of “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” followed by two stanzas from the 1931 poem “Coole and Ballylee.” (Find the complete six-stanza poem here.) The poem was inspired by the graceful Galway estate of Isabella Augusta, Lady Gregory, a co-founder of the Abbey Theatre. Of the matching of ribbons for bosom and head,Īnd they sigh if the wind but lift up a tress:Īnd the seed of the fire gets feeble and cold. Till stars are beginning to blink and peep Īnd the young lie long and dream in their bed Till the seed of the fire flicker and glow It was first published in Yeats’s 1899 anthology, The Wind Among the Reeds, and tells the story of an old and weary peasant woman: The third poem was recorded in March of 1934. And when in my 24th year I made up a poem about a merry fiddler I called him ‘The Fiddler of Dooney’ in commemoration of that rock and all of those picnics.” The next poem was written in 1889, less than a year after “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” “A couple of miles from Innisfree,” says Yeats, “no, four or five miles from Innisfree, there’s a great rock called Dooney Rock where I had often picnicked when a child. While I stand by the roadway, or on the pavements gray, I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore I will arise and go now, for always night and day There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,Īnd I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,ĭropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,Īnd a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made: ” He recites his verse in a somber tone that contemporary poet Seamus Heaney once described as an “elevated chant”: In the first reading, from 1932, Yeats begins with his famous early poem, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” which he once called “my first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music. Yeats made ten radio broadcasts between 19. ‘It gave me a devil of a lot of trouble,’ said Morris, ‘to get that thing into verse!’ It gave me a devil of a lot of trouble to get into verse the poems that I am going to read, and that is why I will not read them as if they were prose.” I remember the great English poet William Morris coming in a rage out of some lecture hall, where somebody had recited a passage out of his Sigurd the Volsung. “I’m going to read my poems with great emphasis upon their rhythm,” says Yeats in the first segment, recorded in 1932, “and that may seem strange if you are not used to it. To mark the date we bring you a series of recordings he made for BBC radio in the final decade of his life. The great Irish poet William Butler Yeats was born on this day in 1865.
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