On [:] Daydream | William Butler Yeats, 1891

Théo van Rysselberghe, Levant isle, 1892

‘An old day-dream of his – Inisfree. Its rocky centre, covered with many bushes, rose some forty feet above the lake. Often when life and its difficulties had seemed to him like the lessons of some elder boy given to a younger by mistake, it had seemed good to dream of going away to that islet and building a wooden hut there and burning a few years out rowing to and fro, fishing, or lying on the island slopes by day, and listening at night to the ripple of the water and the quivering of the bushes – full always of unknown creatures – and going out at morning, to see the island’s edge marked by the feet of birds.’

William Butler Yeats, John Sherman, 1891

This passage from William Butler Yeats’s early novella, John Sherman (1891), is the direct prose foundation for his famous poem, “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 grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

William Butler Yeats, The Lake Isle of Innisfree, 1890

Also:
The Folly Of Being Comforted | A poem by William Butler Yeats, 1904
Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven | A poem by William Butler Yeats, 1899
Adam’s Curse | A poem by William Butler Yeats, 1903