Kirchner Shawn

How Many Isles of Innisfree Are There?

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Image by ponderconnect from Pixabay

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.

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A Staid British Hymn Crosses the Atlantic and Becomes a Rollicking American Folk Favorite

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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

What started out as a beautiful but, as far as I’m concerned, a little stuffy, hymn for the Christian church feast day of Epiphany, written by the Anglican bishop Reginald Heber and published in 1811, underwent a sea change after it voyaged to America. It acquired a new tune via the shape-note tradition that was developed in the mid-1830’s and became especially popular in Appalachia. (You can read a bit about shape-note singing in my post A Rich American Tradition in “Hark! I Hear the Harps Eternal”) It also acquired a new first verse, with the original first verse becoming the refrain, at least in some versions. So I’ll start with the newly-purposed refrain:

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