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,
is the direct prose foundation for his famous poem, “The Lake Isle of
Innisfree.”

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