This poem is by W. B. Yeats. Once at a party the late Pierce Lyons and I took turns trying to recite it by memory. He did better than I.
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 lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
Where I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
– written in 1888.
William Butler Yeats (pronounced Yates). Irish poet born in 1865. At Sewanee I learned of him in Ted Stirling’s class on modern British poetry. Yeats would have done back flips knowing he’d been thrown in with the Brits. His poetry is mystical, very much concerned with its own Irishness. As such, he creates an entire language and vision with its own characters and stories. In one of his poems called “Sailing to Byzantium” he uses a phrase “perne in a gyre” which means none of us knew what. The poem is fantastic but who knows what the phrase means.
During that time, which is the late 70s all things disco were in ascendancy. The movie “Saturday Night Fever” had just come out and contained a song called “Disco Inferno” by a one hit wonder group called the Trammps. In that song there is a chorus whereby the phrase “Burn baby burn” is repeated. You’ve heard it. Jay Fischer and I decided that this refrain sounded better as “Perne baby perne”. We carried this inside joke concerning the poetry of Yeats pretty far and had some fun with it.
Why do I share this bit of trivial history? Because I like to think that despite our lack of respect for Yeat’s use of language, he might have actually been proud of us in that we found a new use for his words. His poetry is incredibly melliflous, and was even able to be adapted to the disco scene. Pretty good, right?
(Editor’s note: The Trammps actually had another minor hit called Rubberband, not to be confused with Rubberband Man by the Spinners. Rubberband seems to have has a life as an EP dance track.)