Ladies and gentlemen,
Today, we gather to celebrate the life and legacy of one of the most luminous figures in the world of literature, William Butler Yeats. Born on this day in 1865, Yeats was not merely a poet but a visionary, a dreamer, and a craftsman of words who wove the threads of Irish identity, mysticism, and universal truths into a tapestry that continues to inspire us all.
Yeats was a poet of paradoxes, a cultural architect and an avid naturalist rooted in the traditions of his Irish homeland yet unafraid to explore the uncharted realms of the spiritual and the modern world. His words carried the weight of history, the beauty of nature, and the complexity of human emotion. From the haunting lines of The Lake Isle of Innisfree to the profound reflections of The Second Coming, Yeats never failed to expose his rhetorics.
On this occasion I would like to present one his most famous poems,
The Lake Isle Of InnisfreeI 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.
Copyright Credit: W.B. Yeats, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree" from The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems. (London: Kagan Paul, Trench and Co., 1889.) Public domain.