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The Lake Isle of Innisfree

Robert Pinsky reads a W.B. Yeats poem in celebration of St. Patrick's Day.

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  • ROBERT PINSKY:

    It's interesting that the great poet of Ireland, a country long associated with strife and troubles, should have written a poem containing one of the best-known uses in poetry of the word "peace."

    Here is William Butler Yeats's "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 honeybee,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 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 dayI 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.