Today’s Poem: The Lake Isle of Innisfree

A prodigal on the alien pavements, sick for home

William Butler Yeats in 1903 (Wikimedia Commons)

It’s said that William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) came to loathe his early poem, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” written in 1888 during his sojourn in London among the Pre-Raphaelites. For the rest of his long life, this was the poem people exhorted him to read aloud, his greatest hit. Though he had the sort o…