Yeats, W. B.

Irish poet, 1865–1939

[Archive rare] [ENG] William B. Yeats lisant ses poèmes

Artesquieu · Jun 9, 2022 · partial coverage

• W. B. Yeats
• poetry reading
• Lake Isle of Innisfree
• Fiddler of Dooney
• rhythm in verse
• Sligo
• William Morris
• archive recording
• Irish poetry

Coverage note: partial (a short recording of a few minutes; the English auto-captions are noisy and garble many words, especially in the poems after the first three, so only what is intelligible is reported, with caution)

Core ideas

Reading for rhythm. Yeats opens by warning listeners that he will read his poems "with great emphasis upon their rhythm," which may seem strange to those unused to it, and recalls William Morris leaving a lecture hall in a rage after someone recited a passage of his in prose-like fashion: it had given him "a devil of a lot of trouble to get into verse." That is why Yeats says he will not read his poems "as if they were prose."

"The Lake Isle of Innisfree." He begins with the poem that, as he admits, is the only one of his that is very widely known. He explains its origin: as a boy in Sligo he wanted to live in a hut on the island of Innisfree ("heather island") in Lough Gill; he wrote the poem in London at about twenty-three, after seeing in a shop window on the Strand a little jet of water balancing a ball, which made him think of Sligo and lake water. He notes that the only obscurity in the poem is the phrase about a "purple glow" at noon (probably, he says, the reflection of heather in the water). He then reads it, and later repeats it in the recording.

"The Fiddler of Dooney" and Sligo places. He recalls that a few miles from Innisfree is a long walk called Dooney Rock, where he picnicked as a child, and that the "Fiddler of Dooney" was written in his mid-twenties in commemoration of those picnics; all the places named in the poems are near Sligo. Fragments of the poem (the fiddle that plays "like a wave of the sea," the merry people who love to dance, and the old woman working at the fire while the young lie dreaming) are partly audible, followed by another reading of Innisfree and further fragments of later poems that the captions render too poorly to identify with confidence.

Excerpts