Seeing an Unseen Isle

Our contemporary ability to record audio and visual can easily make us think of memories as being like a video recording, perhaps with sound.  The manner in which our brains remember is, however, more complex and more subtle than that.  I think the early 19th-century writer Johann Goethe was perceptive in concluding that our memories coalesce around particular events and places.  Many poets have taken advantage of their own feelings that coalesce around a particular place in Nature they experienced.

William Butler Yeats

One of the most popular of such poems has been "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939).  The short twelve-line poem begins simply enough with the poet seemingly saying he will be taking a trip to an island on a lake:

"I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree..."

There follows a short, picturesque description of the place it seems Yeats will be going to.  However, as the poem comes to an end, we realize that Yeats is only going to the island in his memory as a way of getting relief from the unappealing city he is now in:

"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."

Yeats confirmed this interpretation of his poem many years later when he replied to a letter from schoolgirls.  He explained that he wrote the poem when he was "very homesick in London."  His poetic evocation of a place he remembered resonated with readers who had never even seen Yeats beloved isle.  There was appeal in such lines as:

"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."

In English, the word "remember" suggests a type of restoring, a type of being re-joined with something larger that a person is a part of:  We re-member.  As we recollect, we re-collect the broken parts of ourselves, bringing that collection of pieces back together.  To remember can be a way of putting together the pieces of our spirits, our best selves.  Yeats's remembering an isle was to him restorative.

Interestingly, on another occasion Yeats explained that his yearning for such a place began when he was young and his father read him Walden by Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau's description of the place where he lived near Walden pond appealed to the young Yeats.

Thus we have a second kind of coalescence:  We have a network tying together Thoreau's evocative  description of Walden, Yeats's yearning, Yeats's coalesced memory, and the reader's own evoked imagination.  And that coalescence is expanded every time new readers are moved by "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," feeling themselves being made whole again as a place they have never seen emerges in their own imaginations.

~~~

Is there a place you were once at that you can remember in a restorative way?

(The quote from Yeats's letter, dated 30 Nov. 1922, is taken from

A Commentary on the Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats by A. Norman Jeffares, © 1968.  p. 33.)
(The portrait of Yeats by Sargent is in the  public domain, the copyright term being the life of the artist plus 80 years.) 

(Yeats's poem can be read in its entirety at this external link:  "The Lake Isle of Innisfree.")