Timo Kinnunen
Särkiniementie 16 A 41
70700
Kuopio
Finland
Updated on the 9th November in 2016
Lyrics:
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 mourning
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.
W.B. Yeats
There is a lake been called Lough Gill, and an isle which has been called The lake Isle of Innisfree – which lies in Northern Ireland. The whole song is all about this place. W.B. Yeats, in turn, is the famous Irish poet who has written the original text, and Estonian-Finnish Aale Tynni has translated it into Finnish. But from where did Yeats get the whole idea of harmony with nature to this poem? From Thoreau. Just read his own explanation from the passage below:
.... I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill , and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop-window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem Innisfree, my first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music. I had begun to loosen rhythm as an escape from rhetoric and from that emotion of the crowd that rhetoric brings, but I only understood vaguely and occasionally that I must for my special purpose use nothing but the common syntax. A couple of years later I could not have written that first line with its conventional archaism -- Arise and go -- nor the inversion of the last stanza.
A passage from The Thoreau Reader
When thinking these lyrics by W.B. Yeats above, you must become to the necessary conclusion that the whole idea has been derived from Thoreau, indeed, and it is just as someone were recalling his memories, and not that someone were actually living in nature, and telling to us what it is like.