I woke up at 3:00 am thinking about bees (it’s one day before my 60^th birthday, and I still can’t sleep through the night). The day before, my son and I were sitting in the garden when a swarm of bees flew over our heads and settled in a tree across the street. The sound of a bee swarm is alarming, but bees are at their least dangerous when swarming. They have no home to defend; they’re following the queen, who, for reasons known only to her, has decided it’s time to leave the hive and move somewhere new.

In Oregon, we’re in Week 7 of the coronavirus stay-at-home order. Like many of us, I’m having trouble sleeping, but I’m used to that. When I can’t sleep, sometimes I recite poetry in my head. After I thought of yesterday’s bee swarm, these lines from W.B. Yeats’s immortal poem, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” popped into my brain:

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

I’ve fallen in love with a lot of poems, memorized them, idolized them, and, once the glamour wore off, seen them for what they really were: a pile of words containing all the flaws of their creators. But “Innisfree” has never lost its appeal, no matter how many times I read it. Deep in the night, I soothed myself with the lines

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I love the Pacific Northwest’s long, blue spring and summer twilights, where the light fades so slowly it seems night will never come (compensation for the darkness of fall and winter, where evening starts at 3:00 pm). Innisfree, a real place in County Sligo, Ireland, is a lot further north than Oregon. I can well imagine that in summer, midnight would glimmer, never getting all the way dark.

The first and last stanzas begin with the declaration, “I will arise and go now,” which seems to result from an ubrupt, unpremeditated decision. Yeats wrote the poem after standing, homesick, on a street in London in 1888. Like the queen bee leading a swarm, the poem simply takes off from that first line, no explanation needed. 

Right now, while the world is gripped in a terrible crisis, we need to create calm places in our imaginations—to hear “lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore.” I have a copy of “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” pinned to my bulletin board. Every time I look up, I read a line and I’m transported.

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.

Are there specific poems that are helping you right now? Share in the comments.