FINDING YEATS

Somewhere in my youth I missed the connection. Looking back I could blame the professors, but I think now that is a cop-out. Or maybe it isn’t. I was filled to overflow with their words, their witticism, and their take on literature. I had no idea I was to give them mine. Bluebooks and essays covered lectures and published critics, not floundering student ideas.

Consider Yeats. I hated Yeats. Why? I didn’t get Yeats. I read poetry of Yeats for half a semester and can not remember a verse. I look over my notes written in the margin of the poems and know they are only my professor’s words, his lecture. I had no relationship Yeats' poems.

Today, forty years later, I read about "Lorraine" in Brussat’s Spiritual Literacy (1996). The book quotes John Fox’s FindingWhat you Didn’t Lose:

“Lorraine, who works in the fast-paced business of radio broadcasting, tells me she has memorized “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” by William Butler Yeats. She has spoken that poem aloud to herself so many times that the tranquil “Isle of Innisfree” has literally become an interior place for her, a place she knows like she knows her own home. She uses this poem to keep herself centered. She keeps a copy of it on her desk. She says it helps her to recall a sense of stillness. It becomes a source of inspiration and sustenance to her." (280)


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 grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

My tight little college note next to Innisfree is “Walden.” I have underlined Innisfree and linnet. I assume my professor said something about Yeats seeing his Innisfree as similar to Thoreau’s “Walden.” Since I still don’t know what “linnet” means I probably underlined it as a reminder to look up the definition, however I didn’t write the definition anyplace.  I have found now it is “a common small finch of the old world.”

A Bristish web site, .rspb.org.uk/birds/guide/l/linnet/index.asp, describes a linnet as:

"A small, slim finch, widely distributed, and once very popular as a cage bird because of its melodious song. Males are attractively marked with crimson foreheads and breasts, females much browner. It can be flighty and has an undulating flight, usually twittering as it flies. Now it is declining, in common with many other birds which use farmland, and is a Red List species."

Red List means the linnet is protected in the United Kingdom, certainly close to our endangered species list. Did my father see linnets when he walked the roads of western England? “The linnet is a lowland farmland bird, preferring areas of scrub such as gorse or blackthorn, suitable hedges, especially hawthorn, or low trees. It may also be found in orchards, heathland, uncultivated land…” Did my father hear its “warbling, twittering song; call a twittering 'chi chi chi chi.'” Did hearing and observing the linnet link him to home, his own Innisfree? Did watching the linnet “twitter and undulate” remind him of flying, remind him of why he was there, in the middle of England, in 1944?

Yeats coveted an evening of “linnet’s wings,” watching them swoop and “chi, chi” to each other. I covet the chickadee of Michigan the same way as I scrutinize its chubby little body’s hyperactivity as it flits from pine to juniper to hemlock near our Lake Michigan retreat called The Gathering.  As “chick-a-dee, dee, dee,” echoes from the needles, I send praises upward for its resonance. Like Yeats I am thankful for the “bee-loud glade..,”. At the Gathering “I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore. And most of all at the Gathering, like Yeats and Innisfree, “I hear it in the deep heart's core.”

Thank goodness I didn’t abhor Yeats enough to ignore his poetry again. This time I make my own  meaning, my own connections, maybe to my dad from the past, maybe to the Gathering in the present.  Later in a stroll through the Chicago Botanical Gardens I observe "Innisfree" again incribed on a plaque surrounded by delicate pastel petals of perfection dipping ever so quietly into the green ripples of a small lake. Someone at the Gardens had a relationship with the poem too, just like Lorraine, just like me.  Like Yeats, I will not let others take my song again.


I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world's eyes
As though they'd wrought it.
Song, let them take it,
For there's more enterprise
In walking naked.

In the “Comment” section of Poetry (January, 2005) Chris Hedge writes:
"Reading great poems, novels, and essays help us cope with our own insecurities and uncertainty, allowing us to plunge to very depths of our inner being, depths that often lie beyond our articulation. These writers help us to define ourselves and give words to grief and pain and joy that would otherwise lie beyond our reach. And reading like this saves us from the deadening textual criticism and academic snobbery that overpowers and destroys the heart and soul of great art." (308)

Was it academic snobbery which kept me from plunging into the depths of Yeats the first time around? Perhaps there was some of that. But I think it had more to do with my own inadequacies of feeling confident of who I was. At twenty my professors were pouring knowledge all over me. My job was to soak it up, as much as possible. I had no idea I should slosh that knowledge around, letting it blend and breed within me.  I finally get it.


William Butler Yeats poetry is from: Selected Poems and Two Plays of William Butler Yeats, edited by M.L. Rosenthal. New York: Macmillan Co.,1962.