In Ireland, Chasing the Wandering Soul of Yeats

I will arise and go now. …

Surprisingly often, when I get up from a chair to leave a room, those six melodramatic words will unfurl in my mind. Somehow William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” which, like millions of other people, I first read in college, stays rooted in me:

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


And I’m off, not to the dentist or the shopping mall but, mentally, striding emerald slopes, making for a place of myth.

Yeats named the poem after an actual place, an island in the middle of Lough Gill, a lake that spreads itself languidly across five miles of furiously green landscape in County Sligo in northwest Ireland. A few years ago, I found myself in Dublin and decided to do it for real: go to Innisfree. It would be a four-hour detour from the research I was doing for an article, but I had not the slightest doubt the journey would be worthwhile.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/travel/in-ireland-chasing-the-wandering-soul-of-yeats.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-middle-span-region&region=c-column-middle-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-middle-span-region

ANOTHER excuse to go!!!