Rebel Girl's Poetry Corner: "peace comes dropping slow"

At some moments, Rebel Girl feels like she must have done something right. For some summers, high in the Sierra, she has listened to Galway Kinnell recite this Yeats poem and it is as if Yeats himself is in the small room with the dark wooden walls, crowded with poets. He isn't, of course, his words are though and almost chanted or sung in the company of people who recite them with eyes closed or nearly so, and that is close enough, that is closer than she ever imagined she'd be to anything that felt like that.

A few years back Rebel Girl read a story in the NY Times about how Kinnell showed up when Stanley Kunitz was in the hopsital and recited this Yeats' "The Lake Isle of Innisfree." Everyone thought that Kunitz, then 97 or 98, was dying, but he didn't - he lived to go back home and garden and write and read for a couple more years.

Last week, someone out there in the blogosphere requested some Yeats, so here it is, for you, anonymous one, and for Rebel Girl's friend, who has been struggling mightily this last year and half with cancer and is finally home now and forever, where his peace, she hopes, is dropping slow, with friends and family in Echo Park. Soon, she knows, her friend will arise and go. Yeats wrote this poem after reading Thoreau. The "purple glow" is the heather. He was 23.

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 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 the water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.