Based on ideas from OCR's sample lesson plans.

1. The Lake Isle of Innisfree

4. 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 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.

5. The significance of the ‘heart’ metaphor to Yeats…
The only business of the head in the world is to
bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.
Letter to Frederick J. Gregg (1886)
The creations of a great writer are little more
than the moods and passions of his own heart,
given surnames and Christian names, and sent
…Now that my ladder’s gone, to walk the earth.
I must lie down where all the ladders start Letter to the Editor, Dublin Daily Express (1895)
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
The Circus Animals’ Desertion (1939)
…And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
Leda and the Swan (1923)
In courtesy I’d have her chiefly learned;
Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned…
A Prayer for my Daughter (1921)

6. …Consume my heart away; sick with desire Too long a sacrifice
And fastened to a dying animal Can make a stone of the heart.
It knows not what it is; and gather me Easter 1916
Into the artifice of eternity.
Sailing to Byzantium (1926)
A pity beyond all telling
Is hid in the heart of love:
The Pity of Love (1893)
All things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old,
The cry of a child by the roadway, the creak of a lumbering cart,
The heavy steps of the ploughman, splashing the wintry mould,
Are wronging your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.
The Lover Tells of the Rose in his Heart (1899)
Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old.
The Wild Swans at Coole (1916)

7. And the significance of ‘sailing’ as a metaphor to Yeats…
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
Extract from Sailing to Byzantium (1926)
‘I am trying to write about the state of my soul, for it is right for an old man to make his
soul, and some of my thoughts about that subject I have put into a poem called 'Sailing
to Byzantium'. When Irishmen were illuminating the Book of Kells, and making the
jewelled croziers in the National Museum, Byzantium was the centre of European
civilization and the source of its spiritual philosophy, so I symbolize the search for the
spiritual life by a journey to that city.’ WB Yeats, 1931

8. Later explanation as to how he came to write the poem…
‘I planned to live some day in a cottage on a little island called
Innisfree…I should live, as Thoreau lived, seeking wisdom.’
WB Yeats, Autobiographies, 1927.
‘Sometimes I told myself very adventurous love-stories with
myself for hero, and at other times I planned out a life of lonely austerity,
and at other times mixed the ideals and planned a life of
lonely austerity mitigated by periodical lapses. I had still the ambition,
formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau
on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walking
through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water
and saw a fountain in a shop-window which balanced a little ball
upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the sudden
remembrance came my poem `Innisfree', 16 my first lyric with anything
in its rhythm of my own music..’ WB Yeats, Interview with the BBC, 1927.

9. In March 1845, a friend told Thoreau, "Go out upon that, build
yourself a hut, & there begin the grand process of devouring
yourself alive. I see no other alternative, no other hope for you.“
Two months later, Thoreau embarked on a two-year experiment
in simple living when he moved to a small, self-built house on
land in a forest around the shores of Walden Pond. The house
was in "a pretty pasture and woodlot" of 14 acres.
Henry David Thoreau, June 1856
Thoreau left Walden Pond on September 6, 1847. Over several years, he worked to pay off his
debts and also continuously revised his manuscript for what, in 1854, he would publish as
Walden, or Life in the Woods, recounting the two years, two months, and two days he had spent
at Walden Pond. The book compresses that time into a single calendar year, using the passage of
four seasons to symbolize human development. Part memoir and part spiritual quest, Walden at
first won few admirers, but later critics have regarded it as a classic American work that explores
natural simplicity, harmony, and beauty as models for just social and cultural conditions.

10. From the introduction to the text explaining Thoreau’s
reasons…
‘I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential
facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to
die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so
dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to
live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to
put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into
a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to
get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if
it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in
my next excursion.’
Henry David Thoreau, Walden, ‘Where I Lived, and What I Lived For.’ (1854)

12. Who else has Thoreau influenced?
Here, in this courageous New Englander's refusal to pay his taxes and his choice of jail
rather than support a war that would spread slavery's territory into Mexico, I made my
first contact with the theory of nonviolent resistance. Fascinated by the idea of refusing
to cooperate with an evil system, I was so deeply moved that I reread the work several
times.
I became convinced that non co-operation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is
co-operation with good. No other person has been more eloquent and passionate in
getting this idea across than Henry David Thoreau. As a result of his writings and
personal witness, we are the heirs of a legacy of creative protest. The teachings of
Thoreau came alive in our civil rights movement; indeed, they are more alive than ever
before. Whether expressed in a sit-in at lunch counters, a freedom ride into Mississippi,
a peaceful protest in Albany, Georgia, a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, these are
outgrowths of Thoreau's insistence that evil must be resisted and that no moral man can
patiently adjust to injustice.
Martin Luther King, Jr

13. Who else influenced Yeats?
I dipped my oars into the silent lake,
And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boat
Went heaving through the water like a swan;
When, from behind that craggy steep till then
The horizon's bound, a huge peak, black and huge,
As if with voluntary power instinct,
Upreared its head. I struck and struck again,
And growing still in stature the grim shape
Towered up between me and the stars, and still,
For so it seemed, with purpose of its own
And measured motion like a living thing,
Strode after me…. ...No familiar shapes
The Prelude Book I Remained, no pleasant images of trees,
Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields;
But huge and mighty forms, that do not live
Like living men, moved slowly through the mind
By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.
Extracts from William Wordsworth’s ‘The Prelude’ Book I, 1850.

14. ….the cry of unknown birds;
The mountains more by blackness visible
And their own size, than any outward light;
The breathless wilderness of clouds; the clock The immeasurable height
That told, with unintelligible voice, Of woods decaying, never to be decayed,
The widely parted hours; the noise of streams, The stationary blasts of waterfalls,
And sometimes rustling motions nigh at hand, And in the narrow rent at every turn
That did not leave us free from personal fear; Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn,
‘The Prelude’, Book VI The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,
The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,
Black drizzling crags that spake by the way-side
As if a voice were in them, the sick sight
And giddy prospect of the raving stream,
The unfettered clouds and region of the Heavens,
Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light–
Yes, I remember when the changeful earth, Were all like workings of one mind, the features
And twice five summers on my mind had stamped Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree;
The faces of the moving year, even then Characters of the great Apocalypse,
I held unconscious intercourse with beauty The types and symbols of Eternity,
Old as creation, drinking in a pure Of first, and last, and midst, and without end.
Organic pleasure from the silver wreaths ‘The Prelude’, Book VI
Of curling mist, or from the level plain
Of waters coloured by impending clouds.
‘The Prelude’, Book I

15. These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and ’mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration:—feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps, …And I have felt
As have no slight or trivial influence A presence that disturbs me with the joy
On that best portion of a good man’s life, Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts Of something far more deeply interfused,
Of kindness and of love. Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
Extracts from William Wordsworth’s ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey,
July 1798.’

16. ‘The sublime’ in poetry and literature…
Wordsworth got his idea of the sublime as it was developed by the writer Edmund Burke in A
Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756). Burke was the
first philosopher to argue that the sublime and the beautiful are mutually exclusive. The imagination
is moved to awe and instilled with a degree of fear by what is ‘dark, uncertain, and confused.’ While
the relationship of the sublime and the beautiful is one of mutual exclusiveness, either one can
produce pleasure. The sublime may inspire fear, but one receives pleasure in knowing that the
perception is a largely a fiction.
The feeling Wordsworth expresses is beyond rational understanding; it is a feeling of
the sublime, of all the grandeur and divinity in the natural world. It’s a state of being
that transcends the mundane and mechanical world in which we live. For the
Romantics, it represented the longing to be free. But the sublime was more than just
the beauty of a sunset, it was about awe and terror…The sublime is man lost in the
immensity of nature.– Peter Ackroyd
Is The Lake Isle of Innisfree about awe and terror? Is it ‘the sublime’ that Yeats is
searching for?
Watch the extracts from the series on the Romantics here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rja9-CLj0hg&feature=related
You’re looking for the episodes (wrongly labelled) Eternity, parts 3 and 4.

17. Or is Yeats after something simpler?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p003c1cs
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss pastoral literature and to what extent does it represent
a continuous yearning for a non-existent Golden Age of Innocence? How far did it evolve
to reflect the social and political preoccupations of its times and what were the real
meanings of its much used metaphors of town and country?
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods or steepy mountain yields.
And we will sit upon the rocks,
Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks,
By shallow rivers to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.
An entreaty from Christopher Marlowe's Passionate Shepherd to His Love - thought by many
to be the crowning example of Elizabethan pastoral poetry. The traditions of pastoral poetry,
literature and drama can be traced back to the third century BC and have principally offered a
conventionalised picture of rural life, the naturalness and innocence of which is seen to
contrast favourably with the corruption and artificialities of city and court life. Pastoral
literature deals with tensions between nature and art, the real and the ideal, the actual and
the mythical, and although pastoral works have been written from the point of view of
shepherds, they have often been penned by highly sophisticated, urban poets.

18. http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=1689
http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=1688
http://www.bbc.co.uk/poetryseason/poets/wb_yeats.shtml
http://www.nli.ie/yeats/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9LelXa3U_I#t=15m35s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&v=beQdcwTqcyU&NR=1
http://poetryx.com/
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Butler_Yeats