Sir, – The genesis of a poem is often uncertain and scholars have been puzzled by Yeats poem The Lake Isle of Innisfree. In "WB Yeats – A Life" Roy Foster quoted from Yeats first draft:
“I will arise and go now and go to the island of Innisfree
And live in a dwelling of wattles-of woven wattles and woodwork made,
Nine bean rows will I have there, a yellow hive for the honey bee
And this old care shall fade.”
This was a poem that Yeats recorded, though in later life he did not much like it himself. The island in Loch Gill in Sligo is small, close to the side of the lake and without glades or bees. Other islands in the lake have been suggested including one with some monastic ruins which was later lived on by an old lady whose poteen still was discovered after she died in the 1960s.
Islands that might be the source of this nostalgic memory are in the royal parks in London. Yeats was living in Bedford Park in the 1890s when he first drafted this poem having just returned from a holiday in Ireland. The idea of a simple life away from the city would have been familiar to him, knowing Henry Thoreau's Walden, which had been published in 1845. Beehives with bees are still kept in the royal parks to help with the pollination of flowers and were doing so when Yeats wrote this poem.
He finally wrote – possibly following Thoreau, who had built a log cabin for himself at Walden Pond – “and a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made”, and ending “always night and day I hear lake water lapping and low sounds by the shore, while I stand on the roadway or on the pavement grey, I hear it in the deep heart’s core”.
I visited Duck Island in St James’s Park in London some years ago and it still had a beehive in front of a wattle fence. The poem was written shortly after he returned from a holiday in Ireland when he lived in Bedford Park so this island may have been the genesis of one of his earliest and best-loved poems. – Yours, etc,
Dr THOMAS BEWLEY,
London.