Favorite poems: nature poetry

William Butler Yeats

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 honeybee,
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 crickets sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnets' wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake 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.

Yeats said this poem came to him in a moment one day in 1888. He was standing on a London street, watching a ball balance on a jet water in a shop window. Its sound reminded him of water lapping at the shore of a lake, and suddenly he was overcome with longing for his childhood home in Sligo, in the north of Ireland.

This is one of the first poems I ever learned by heart, decades ago. I have said it to myself, to lovers lying beside me and to babies resisting sleep; I've said it trudging through snow, sitting on beaches and wending my way through the New York subways.

Yeats's rhythms and imagery are so subtle--both insistent and delicate--that I can't imagine ever forgetting the poem or tiring of it. It yields to many interpretations: it can be said wistfully or with passionate anticipation; it can be read so as to progress from the one to the other as its stanzas unfold. Try saying it every day for a week, and its music will be indelibly printed on your mind.

If someone asked me what distinguishes poetry from prose, I'd recite these dozen radiant lines of longing.

This is the landscape in Sligo that Yeats was thinking of.

Stanley Kunitz

All summer I heard them
rustling in the shrubbery,
outracing me from tier
to tier in the garden,
a whisper among the viburnums,
a signal flashed from the hedgerow,
a shadow pulsing
in the barberry thicket.
Now that the nights are chill
and the annuals spent,
I should have thought them gone,
in a torpor of blood
slipped to the nether world
before the sickle frost.
Not so. In the deceptive balm
of noon, as if defiant of the curse
that spoiled another garden,
these two appear on show
through a narrow slit
in the dense green brocade
of a north-country spruce,
dangling head-down, entwined
in a brazen love-knot.
I put out my hand and stroke
the fine, dry grit of their skins.
After all,
we are partners in this land,
co-signers of a covenant.
At my touch the wild
braid of creation
trembles.

Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006) is one of the essential American poets--a writer who extended the traditions of poetry in English that go back to Chaucer and Shakespeare while being utterly American and fully contemporary. He also exercised broad influence as a teacher, because he mentored many of the best modern U.S. poets.

Kunitz was still writing in his 90s, and the poems of his last years--this is one of them--have an extraordinary, concentrated beauty.