‘AND I SHALL HAVE SOME PEACE THERE’ (February 2011) got its title from a poem I first read in college, more than 30 years ago. For each of us, I suppose, there is a poem or poems that we never forget; William Butler Yeats’s “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” is one of mine. When it was time to name the book I had just finished writing, in November 2009, I could think of nothing better to call it than the Yeats line that had long called out to me.

‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’

By 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 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 gray,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.