The Lake Isle of Innisfree / W.B. Yeats

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.

~~
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), 1888
from The Countess Kathleen, 1892

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada, the United States, and the European Union]

W.B. Yeats biography
Notes on The Lake Isle of Innisfree

"The Lake Isle of Innisfree" (music by Brian Dunning & Jeff Johnson). Courtesy Jeff Johnson.

Stony Lake / Katherine Hale

Stony Lake

By southern seas I have seen purple stones
Throw back the shadows of the waves and hills.
On the Ǽgean, so the stories run,
Greek youths, with many a saffron-coloured sail,
Rode flame-like to the rhythm of the gale.

Again, on the bright shores of this small lake,
Purple of hills and pink of northern rocks.
To-day I met a sail-boat in the wind
And at its mast a brown Canadian boy —
He was as splendid as his mate of Troy.

---
Katherine Hale
from Morning in the West, 1923


[Poem is in the public domain in Canada]

Katherine Hale biography

The Unnamed Lake / Frederick George Scott

    The Unnamed Lake

    It sleeps among the thousand hills
        Where no man ever trod,
    And only nature's music fills
        The silences of God.

    Great mountains tower above its shore,
        Green rushes fringe its brim,
    And o'er its breast for evermore
        The wanton breezes skim.

    Dark clouds that intercept the sun
        Go there in Spring to weep,
    And there, when Autumn days are done,
        White mists lie down to sleep.

    Sunrise and sunset crown with gold
        The peaks of ageless stone,
    Where winds have thundered from of old
        And storms have set their throne.

    No echoes of the world afar
        Disturb it night or day,
    The sun and shadow, moon and star
        Pass and repass for aye.

    'Twas in the grey of early dawn,
        When first the lake we spied,
    And fragments of a cloud were drawn
        Half down the mountain side.

    Along the shore a heron flew,
        And from a speck on high,
    That hovered in the deepening blue,
        We heard the fish-hawk's cry.

    Among the cloud-capt solitudes,
        No sound the silence broke,
    Save when, in whispers down the woods,
        The guardian mountains spoke.

    Through tangled brush and dewy brake,
        Returning whence we came,
    We passed in silence, and the lake
        We left without a name.

~~
Frederick George Scott (1861-1944)
from The Unnamed Lake and other poems, 1897.

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada and the United States]

Frederick George Scott biography

How Spring Came (to the Lake Region) / William Wilfred Campbell

How Spring Came (to the Lake Region)

No passionate cry came over the desolate places,
No answering call from iron-bound land to land;
But dawns and sunsets fell on mute, dead faces,
And noon and night death crept from strand to strand.

Till love breathed out across the wasted reaches,
And dipped in rosy dawns from desolate deeps;
And woke with mystic songs the sullen beaches,
And flamed to life the pale, mute, death-like sleeps.

Then the warm south, with amorous breath inblowing,
Breathed soft o’er breast of wrinkled lake and mere;
And faces white from scorn of the north’s snowing,
Now rosier grew to greet the kindling year.

---
William Wilfred Campbell (1860-1918)
from Lake Lyrics, and other poems, 1893

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada, the United States, and the European Union]

William Wilfred Campbell biography

The Winter Lakes / William Wilfred Campbell

         
The Winter Lakes

Out in a world of death far to the northward lying,
     Under the sun and the moon, under the dusk and the day;
Under the glimmer of stars and the purple of sunsets dying,
     Wan and waste and white, stretch the great lakes away.

Never a bud of spring, never a laugh of summer,
     Never a dream of love, never a song of bird;
But only the silence and white, the shores that grow chiller and dumber,
     Wherever the ice winds sob, and the griefs of winter are heard.

Crags that are black and wet out of the gray lake looming,
     Under the sunset’s flush and the pallid, faint glimmer of dawn;
Shadowy, ghost-like shores, where midnight surfs are booming
     Thunders of wintry woe over the spaces wan.

Lands that loom like spectres, whited regions of winter,
     Wastes of desolate woods, deserts of water and shore;
A world of winter and death, within these regions who enter,
     Lost to summer and life, go to return no more.

Moons that glimmer above, waters that lie white under,
     Miles and miles of lake far out under the night;
Foaming crests of waves, surfs that shoreward thunder,
     Shadowy shapes that flee, haunting the spaces white.

Lonely hidden bays, moon-lit, ice-rimmed, winding,
     Fringed by forests and crags, haunted by shadowy shores;
Hushed from the outward strife, where the mighty surf is grinding
     Death and hate on the rocks, as sandward and landward it roars.

~~
William Wilfred Campbell
from Lake Lyrics, and other poems, 1889

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada, the United States, and the European Union]

William Wilfred Campbell biography

Morning on the Shore / William Wilfred Campbell

 
Morning on the Shore 

The lake is blue with morning; and the sky
      Sweet, clear, and burnished as an orient pearl.
      High in its vastness, scream and skim and whirl
White gull-flocks where the gleaming beaches die
Into dim distance, where great marshes lie.
      The dew-wet road in ruddy sunlight gleams,
      The sweet, cool earth, the clear blue heaven on high.
Across the morn a carolling school-boy goes,
Filling the world with youth to heaven’s stair;
      Some chattering squirrel answers from his tree;
But down beyond the headland, where ice-floes
Are great in winter, pleading in mute prayer,
      A dead, drowned face stares up immutably.

~~
William Wilfred Campbell (1860-1918)
from The Dread Voyage Poems, 1893

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada, the United States, and the European Union]

William Wilfred Campbell biography