“The Lake Isle of Innisfree” and Your Call to a Deeper Life

In the dark of the concert hall, as the voices of the chorale floated on air, I closed my eyes and saw myself on a snow-covered hill, trudging up through wilted stalks of tall grass and bare birch trunks. As I neared the summit, I saw in the distance, in a valley, the golden domes of a church.

The image ended there. I sat through the rest of the concert and walked home to my apartment in Novosibirsk, without any epiphanies or even a memorable thought. Yet that image stuck with me.

It became a personal symbol of the inner journey I was on, as well as the sense of wonder and mystery that underlay my time in Russia. I was searching for something, approaching something … but it was a mystery that rose like a church in the distance, a beauty I couldn’t yet reach.

This is the heart of your life, it seemed to say. Come closer.

Have you ever felt that call? It pulls, but gently. It’s a constant, glowing attraction that draws you to a deeper, simpler, more mysterious life. Even if you do not (knowingly) pray, but have developed a certain sensitivity and thoughtfulness, you must know what that feels like.

Many times, we can’t pinpoint the direction, let alone name the source. But our imaginations try.

The Irish poet W. B. Yeats wrote a lovely poem, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” about such a call. In this case, it was a call to a place that was both a real exterior landscape as well as a powerful interior one.

Here is the poem in full, with audio:

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“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.

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Leave the academic interpretations to the academics — for me, this poem is about the call of a simpler, deeper life. A contemplative life, full of quiet and mystery and, yes, nature.

People sometimes scoff at the pastoral imagination and the longing for a “simple life,” rightly pointing out that just hopping off to the countryside is not going to solve your simplicity problems. (You take your own heart’s complexity wherever you go.)

Still, there’s something in it.

In this poem, as in other interior landscapes like it, you can’t reduce the longing to the pastoral imagery. This goes far beyond being “one with nature.”

This is about a desire for a wholesome and modest life, one with more beauty, more focus, more purpose. Less of these “pavements grey,” these endless roadways of our lives rushing past with such noise that the term “bee-loud” seems ironic in comparison.

Longings like that are too common to the human race to come from nowhere. When you catch yourself wandering through idealized interior landscapes, you must ask yourself: what am I looking for? Where is this longing leading me?

“Peace comes dropping slow.” Even more than in Yeats’s time, our world needs more slow. Slow down, stop rushing along the pavements grey. Look at where you are. What are you rushing toward? What will you do when you get there?

I will arise and go now.

Always…I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore…I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

I hear the same. A gentle whispering, a deep pulling of something I can’t name, an Innisfree that has no geographical location except in the heart. I heard echoes of it in the snowy land- and cityscapes of Siberia, as I glimpse it in the dense autumn forests of Pennsylvania and feel it in the stirring pre-dawn lauds sung in the basilica of St. Vincent Archabbey.

My Innisfree is calling — and half the depth and contentment of my present life exists in merely listening and longing.

Perhaps that’s what contemplative prayer is, after all. Listening. Longing. Waiting for the arrival of the Beloved, at last.

The interior landscape is both a place to wait and a letter of promise: the Beloved comes to fulfill it.