WB Yeats is one of my favourite poets. Remind me to tell you a few stories the next time we speak.

By the way, there is a recording of Yeats reading this, and he had a very specific reading style for his poetry.

I definitely love the experience of listening to poetry, but find my mind a jumbled mess when I try to read it visually for whatever reason. This was a great video!

The best poets in the world today are writting bars for an Alchemist beat. Loved the video. Loved the note about reading out loud.

Beautiful poem, reading, and fall setting! I love how empathetic you are to the concerns your students shared: feeling like poetry is a 'puzzle to be solved.' Much of education these days is focused on needing to have 'the right answer" and finding that answer in a specific place, so it's completely understandable to have poetry anxiety. The nature imagery in this poem is gorgeous, and I completely agree that those pauses/silences after each line evoke the stillness that pervades nature-a stillness synonymous with peace. The monosyllabic phrasing of the last line "I hear it in the deep heart's core," makes me think of a steady heart beat. It also makes me wonder if the idea is that this place of refuge is always within the person. It also adds this sense of certainty or inner knowing. Peace isn't really out there in a perfect dream but inside the dreamer. Thank you, Philip!

I’m from Ireland, and this was one of the first poems I ever read, and one of my favourites. Have been to lough gill; it’s a beautiful place. Loved this video💚

I love the melodic cadences of words in poetry.

Great video, Philip. Agreed about the experience and being in the moment. Love the trees in the background and worked well with the unity of nature to your point :D

Love this poem. I have a slightly different take on some of it. First, for me the last lines of the stanzas don’t just suggest stanza. They have five feet instead of six, and it feels like they are simply cut short. Especially so in the first and last, which both end with three strong accents. These endings, given what’s come before, are abrupt and almost brutal. They pull me out of the peacefulness, and I think that’s the point. It’s a vision of peace that Yeat’s is aspiring to. Innisfree sounds a bit like inner freedom, and I can’t think that’s an accident, especially since we end with the “deep heart’s core.” But he isn’t actually going there, it’s more of an attempted spiritual journey, but one that repeatedly fails right is in danger of failing. I wouldn’t put so much emphasis on silence. He goes out of his way to emphasize the noises. It reminds me of the scene in Annie Hall where Alvie Singer can’t sleep in the countryside because of all the noise - crickets, etc…. Love that you mentioned Thoreau. I wonder if Yeats had Walden in mind. One of my favorite lines in that book is when Thoreau describes his own efforts at planting bean rows, and declares “I desired to know beans.” Finally, I think the phrase “for peace comes dropping slow.” For me, in the poem, it harks back to the honey, but it’s way more pregnant with meaning than that. I enjoyed this, and would be delighted to hear more. Also, I think Yeats was a great place to start. It’s such a great poem, and probably Yeats at his most lyrical (though there are other poems of his I like better.)

Hey, I really enjoyed your Video on this poem. I myself have never really gotten into poetry, because in school poetry was always just this really boring task, in which you have to find a specific message. You have resparked my interest and I wanted to ask you for an poetry collection with more of these beautiful to read poems, which is also understandable for poetry newbees. Do you happen to know any?

Woohoo 🙌. Thank you for another poetry MasterClass! And what a beautiful poem by Yeats. While I do feel a sense of peace, I get a even stronger sense of regret. The use of “roadway” at the end of the poem evokes a sense of life choices and the path one might find ourselves on. There is regret in finding oneself on a grey pavement devoid of beauty and cut off from nature. Just beautiful. Is there a volume of Yeats’ poetry that you would recommend? Also, is there a text that you would recommend if I want to dive into the structure of poems? Thanks 🙏

Fall colors 🍂🍂🍂🍂

This was such a rich and immersive video Philip. Thank you so much for sharing this.

Love the trees behind you! The reading was lovely!!

Beautiful poem and lovely recitation Philip thank you. I enjoy poetry immensely Philip, it touches my soul in ways prose can't. Poetry is so powerful. Here some of my favourites, all quite different but you will see the strength of emotion in each of them. 1, The Cataract of Lodore by Robert Southey. 2, Continuities by Walt Whitman. 3, The Ballad of Reading Gaol by Oscar Wilde. 4, Daffodils by William Wordsworth. I hope you enjoy these Philip. 🤓

I have a really mixed experience with English teachers in school. Only when I was 14 did an English teacher actually encourage me to explore my own thoughts and writing style. Getting older and preparing for exams, I think it was a Sylvia Plath poem where I had a completely different interpretation of one of the lines to our teacher, who very matter-of-factly pointed out that I was wrong. She was very focused on making sure the class understood the meanings and themes in the same way, so that everyone was able to discuss them to the same level of competence. My last two years of English in school were some of the least engaging I've had, as it boiled down to rigorous note-taking and memorization. Thanks for ending some of my stigma against poetry.

This is wonderful, thank you!

I almost get the feeling that the pov character has never been to Innisfree. They have idealized the place in their desire to leave their current location.

Lovely reading and perfect setting. Are you sure you did not sneek over here to Ireland to record this? I could swear I can hear the waves of Lough Gill in the background. Surely it's just behind those trees.😁

Not huge on Yeats but this is my favorite from him! So true about over-analysis stealing the joy of experiential reading. My sister is annoyed by Imagism right now, and I told her it sounds like she is more worried about "getting" it than allowing it to be what it is and isn't. I prescribed her a short trot through New York School poems with no overthinking allowed, just the experience. I don't know if that will help her with Imagists but it was what came to mind as a way to hopefully subvert the analytical urge lol. 🤔

I never thought I liked poetry until I started watching spoken word performances, which I find to be so impactful (and often even emotional). In uni I am now learning that I actually enjoy more 'traditional' poetry as well. While I was a bit overwhelmed by all the terminology at first (which I now recognized and understood in this video, yay), I have come to really appreciate reading poetry. It is indeed such a different experience from reading fiction and it took me some time to adjust. Now that I am going into a poem with the 'right' mindset (and a lot more patience), it is so cool to discover what poems can evoke in the reader. Luckily my teacher also really emphasized that it is not the goal to over-analyze the text, she taught us to just let the text flow and sink in and to interpret it in whatever way feels right for us personally. Thank you for making this video, I really loved hearing you talk about this! :)

What a wonderful surprise to see this video in my feed! I’ve been unable to watch booktube the the past few weeks and just opened the app and saw this! Thank you so much for sharing. The Yates poem really speaks to me, as I’m often daydreaming of escaping to nature while in the concrete jungle of the city. It pulled at my heartstrings. Luckily I’ll be escaping the city to for a lovely train ride the ocean for a few days next week. You’ve inspired me to try some more Yates poems on the train. Luckily I have a small private compartment so I’ll give your reading out loud tip a try. Thank you again so much for sharing this with all of us😊

Upon listening to you recite Yeats' poem, I felt a sense of calm and escape. I felt this return to nature. This appreciation for the beauty and wonders of nature. It's like when I go on vacation, or to the countryside, or even just outside on my balcony and I look out on something of nature- like a flower, or a bird, or even a dewdrop, and I'll have this moment of serenity and gratitude for the way the Earth evolved over time to give me that moment right before my dog pulls me out of it by barking at a squirrel. Sorry for the long comment but I wanted to share my thoughts on the poem because it was very lovely. I haven't read anything from Yeats before and I want to change that now. I also want you to know I appreciate what you do on your channel. We hardly ever see poem breakdowns on Booktube and we should see more of this.

Nice video.. 📖🍁

💜💜💜

This was an fantastic video. I really felt the meditative part you mentioned. I was lying in bed and only listening to the video. So when you read the poem it really took me to a lake. Or rather to a coast because in my mind the birds doing bird sounds in the background were seagulls. Also your calming voice was just so enjoyable. Accordingly, I had to watch the video twice to get the content. Which was very pleasant.

Love this and would love more videos like it Philip. I'm Irish, my personal favourite Yeats poem is Easter 1916 "a terrible beauty is born". But my favourite Irish poet is without a doubt Heaney. A colossus. I was lucky enough to study English lit in Galway, my education has been heavily tilted towards Irish writers but in all honesty, why venture outside the best ;-)

Thank you so much for this video! I’ll be pointing my voice students to this as a crash course in analyzing a poem! As an opera singer, my life is analyzing poetry to find the best way to bring prose to life. I think there have been several great setting of this poem

Some poems seem to speak to my heart; i can't tell what it's about right away, but i understand it on a subconsious level (i hope that makes sence). Loved this video, thanks!

My first thought was, the idea of a romantic description of what peace might be in the first part. In the second part i get the feeling that he thinks peace is not so easy to get hold of (like drops of water) and in the last part i think he realises that true peace is not a real thing, but can just exist in your thoughts... I know it´s a kind of sad interpretation, but it although gives the hope that everyone can have peace because it' s about your thoughts and not your real life surroundings. The first few words and the last few words combined are "I will arise and go now,....in the deep heart´s core.

Beautiful setting for a poem reading, wouldn't mind seeing more of it. 😊 Something about this poem makes me just feel sad. These seems to be some undercurrent of frustration or even depression that I can't really put my finger on. Maybe it's the stark contrast between where he wants to be and where he is. Maybe it the lack of colors aside from purple and gray, despite describing a scene of nature. Maybe it's because 'bee-loud glade' sounds like 'be loud glade' - a place where you can cry or scream to your heart's content.

Some of my favorite poetry doesn't "do" what poetry is "supposed to do", so it's interesting to hear how beautiful traditional poetry can be. Would love to hear you examine the poetry I enjoy (my two favorites are "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg and "lighght" by Aram Saroyan), or even more poetry in general, it's definitely something I'm not finding on most booktube channels outside of specific instances (like fantasy-centric channels). Would be great to hear someone who is both trained to teach, and passionate about poetry!

yeats has so many great poems my favorite is "the second coming"

Might we a see a video of you and Dr Fireballs giving a lecture on Malazan in Innisfree? Foreshadowing,eh?

:D

Thank you Philip, this was a very thoughtful take on this poem, and a nice reading. I like Yeats' poetry a lot, and i came to his works via fantasy literature, when I started looking for poets who explored myths and legends in their work. Is there a special term for this "roughly iambic" metre? In my native Russian, "roughly so-and-so" metres are very common, almost the default mode for contemporary poetry, and there are special names for their subtypes. And one more question. Do you know any contemporary poets who are inspired by fantasy or sci-fi?

When you said “dropping slow” evoked images of dew, it triggered a memory of a poem called The Song of Ciabhán by Ethna Carbery, a lesser known Irish nationalist poet, where she actually uses the phrase “Slow-dropping dew…” And when I reread the poem, I noticed for the first time some similarities between it and The Lake Isle of Innisfree. Had Yeats influenced Carbery because his poem was published before hers? I presume they knew each other because she had co-founded a women’s organization with Maud Gonne, Yeat’s love interest. Yet, to be fair, I think Carbery’s poem wasn’t published until after she died, so who knows when she actually wrote it? Or are both poems reflective of a strong, collective narrative among Irish nationalists?

Middle and high grade teachers have made poetry a difficult genre to approach. Telling a child you’re wrong when they have an interpretation of some classical poem where the interpretations have been set is a poor way of getting those kids excited about it. And as Allen has said on his channel, kids are being turned away from reading, in this case poems, because they are forced to read work that they can’t connect with.