Good question! Do you mean the place, the actual isle or island? Or do you mean the song? Or perhaps the poem? As you can see, it’s complicated.
Let me start out with the poem that William Butler Yeats wrote in 1888, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” Since it’s only 12 lines I’m going to quote it in full here:
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 honey-bee,
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;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
Even if you slept through all your English classes that had anything to do with poetry, the above words may still have rung a bell. ‘Hmmm,’ you might have thought. ‘Who else went out into the woods, built himself a cabin, lived by himself, and tended beans? Good old Henry David Thoreau, that’s who.’ When my choir first rehearsed a piece with these words I thought, “This sounds just like Walden.” Sure enough: Yeats’ father read that book aloud to his son when he was a child, and Yeats specifically said that his poem was inspired by it. Here’s a small sample of what Thoreau had to say about his own bean field: “What shall I learn of beans or beans of me? I cherish them, I hoe them, early and late I have an eye to them; and this is my day’s work.” Thoreau devotes a whole chapter to his bean field; Yeats says what he has to say in half a line of poetry.
You might wonder if the name “Innisfree” has any particular meaning in and of itself, as it would seem from the poem to reference the idea of freedom from civilization. I ran across a scholarly article that explains :
Inis Fraoigh in the original Irish means “The Island of Heather” and has nothing whatsoever to do with freedom. Indeed, as the name implies, it is very much rooted in a physical, tangible world through the descriptive element of the place name. Yeats, however, through in this instance the happy but coincidental added value of the transliteration (as against translation) of the original, can actually add a layer of metaphoric significance to his poem not achievable in the Irish version of the name.(“From Inis Fraoigh to Innisfree . . . and Back Again? Sense of Place in Poetry in Irish since 1950”)
There was a real Isle of Innisfree that Yeats had in mind when he wrote the poem, however much symbolism he or commentators may have attached to the term. Innisfree is an uninhabited island in Lough Gill, or Loch Gile, or Lake Gill, Ireland. Yeats grew up in Sligo, a town on the banks of the lake, and he loved to visit the remote island and even dreamed of living there. The last line of the poem is especially evocative: “I hear it in the deep heart’s core.” Yeats said that the inspiration for the poem came from hearing a fountain in a shop window and being reminded of the island. It’s great to think of him standing amid the rush and bustle of the city, imagining himself somewhere else, back in the quiet and solitude of Innisfree. Part of the human condition always to long for something you can’t have!
Yeats’ poem has been put to music by a number of artists, including the local Denver duo of Beth Gadbaw and Margot Krimmel, with whom my own choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale, has performed a number of times. But guess what? There’s another, much more widely-known piece with a similar title, “The Isle of Innisfree,” that has text and music by someone else, the Irish songwriter, policeman and poet Dick Farrelly, who got the inspiration for the song while on a bus trip in Ireland. While Yeats’ poem refers to a specific place, Farrelly’s words refer to an immigrant’s longing for his native land of Ireland as a whole. I won’t quote the whole thing, but here’s the first verse:
I’ve met some folks
Who say that I’m a dreamer
And I’ve no doubt
There’s truth in what they say
But sure a body’s bound to be a dreamer
When all the things he loves are far away
And precious things
Are dreams unto an exile
They take him o’er
The land across the sea
Especially when it happens he’s an exile
From that dear lovely Isle of Innisfree.
The song was published in 1950, and somehow the American film director John Ford heard a performance and fell in love with it. He decided to use the song as the theme for his 1952 film The Quiet Man, which starred John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara. However though (and you may picture me wagging my finger at Mr. Ford, metaphorically speaking), no credit was given to Farrelly for the use of the song. I’m sure I could do one of my celebrated internet dives and find out the whole background on the story, but I’m going to restrain myself. Farrelly didn’t come out of the deal too badly, as the song became very popular. It’s been covered by a number of artists.
I’m going to start out a selection of videos with the setting of Yeats’ poem that I’ve sung, although, sadly, I don’t have access to our own performance. This is the only one I could find on YouTube, and it includes Gadbaw and Krimmel. They are so great! I must say that their version is my favorite:
Other artists have sung other versions, and since I’m a great fan of Judy Collins I’ll give you her version even though it doesn’t show her singing:
And now on to Farrelly’s version, again not live performances but one with images from the film, sung by Bing Crosby (for whom it was a huge hit) and one by the Dublin City Ramblers, who are really great:
