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 in low sounds by the shore: While I stand in the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
There are many avenues of analysis available in examining this deceptively simple lyric (syllabic density, for example: of the 126 words in this text, 105 are words of only one syllable; only one word—the title of the work—has three syllables; and only the last of the poem’s twelve lines is entirely monosyl- labic). But by far the most straightforward approach is to ask key questions.
Who speaks? Innisfree is written in the first person singular, which suggests that the poet himself is speaking. And in fact, he is: Yeats is speaking about a real place, one he knows inti- mately, an island in Lough (Gaelic for “Lake”) Gill in County Sligo, near where he and his family lived. As a child, Yeats visited Lough Gill at night; years later, while living in Lon- don, he would walk down Fleet Street in the evening, where the sound of water from a fountain in a shop window reminded him of his visits to that magical place. It is this inspiration that Yeats credits in his Autobiography for the origin of the poem.
Who listens? This is a harder question, and for a simple rea- son: there is more than one way to answer it. Is the poet merely talking out loud to himself? To an invisible companion, imag- ined or real? To the memory of his younger, innocent self? To the recollection of a simpler and less-complicated time? Any of these are possible answers, and each of them is potentially valid. Perhaps the best answer is, “Yes: all of the above.”
What’s the message? Yeats posits that life should be lived in harmony with nature and aligned with one’s inner values. Even if a dwelling of clay and mud (wattles) was not as chic as one built from wood or stone, possessing enough land to plant nine full rows of beans and be surrounded by beehives was to enjoy a life of reasonably comfortable self-reliance. It is this youthful, self-sufficient ideal (not unlike Thoreau’s Walden) that Yeats holds up for examination.
Why proclaim this message? In a sense, Yeats is fighting for his soul in front of our eyes. He compares his present circum- stances—a young man attempting to make his way in indus- trial London—with a different place and time. In the midst of the dreary grayness and noise of the city, Yeats decides to do the hardest thing of all: to be true to his inner calling, to answer the voice that speaks “in the deep heart’s core.” The belief that truths dwelling deep within are essential to life was one that guided Yeats always; it was his primary undertaking as a poet, and this poem marks the beginning of that journey in a very concrete way.
What does this message mean to us? Rather than answer
this question directly, let me quote from the composer’s note that I added to my setting of this text (octavo G-7005 from GIA Publications, Inc.):
What is your deepest longing? What secret lives in your deep heart’s core? Where is home for you? Are you there now, or still searching for it? Whatever your answers to these questions turn out to be, if you put them into how you sing “Innisfree,” the result will be true and honest music-making that releases real healing into a broken world that desperately needs it—and that is all any com- poser could hope or ask for.
How we ask these questions is almost as important as decid- ing to ask them at all. It’s important that our singers don’t feel compelled to come up with the “right” or “perfect” answer to any of them. Most of all, we need approach the process in way that brings about intentional engagement to our singers.
Modeling the process is one way to begin incorporating key questions into the rehearsal process. Do it in small doses, not all at once. Choose any one of the topics to begin with: “What did this mean to the author? What did this mean to the audi- ence? What do these words mean to you, today—what in your life experience reinforces their message?”
But there are other approaches that work equally well, either in place of doing it in the rehearsal context, or in tandem with it. Assign a different question to each section of the choir as “homework reflection,” and take 5 minutes in each rehearsal to report out and discuss the answers as an ensemble. For younger singers, consider having them answer the questions non-verbally with collages. Older students can be challenged to take their analysis and see if the composer has responded to the cues they’ve found in the text.
Be patient, and allow time for this new approach to gain trac- tion. If we expect our students to respond thoughtfully, they generally will. Above all, help the singers to make the text their own in the present moment, before they give it away!
Portions of this article appeared in different form in the GIA Quarterly (GIA Publications, Chicago, IL)
Dr. Jerry Custer conducts the Choral Union at Wayne State University in Detroit, where he also teaches music theory and composi- tion. An award-winning, Grammy-nomi- nated composer, his choral music has been commissioned, performed, and recorded by choirs led by Joseph Flummerfelt, Joe Miller, James Jordan, and others. With Dr. Blake Henson, he is the author of two ground-breaking books: The Composer’s
Craft: Practical Advice for Teachers and Students, and From Words to Music: A User’s Guide to Text for Choral Musicians (GIA, Chicago). For more information, go to
www.gerald-
custer.net, or contact him at
custer@wayne.edu.
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