The Bee-Loud Glade

I’m often asked about the site name – what does it mean?

“The bee-loud glade” is from The Lake Isle at Innisfree by W.B. Yeats. It’s one of my favorite poems, and the first one I ever memorized. I’ve heard Yeats was inspired by the trancendental qualities of Emerson’s Walden. Perhaps most famously, it was read at JFK’s funeral, and the writing does have a strong elegiac tone.

But what I come away from the poem with is this: that through an attentiveness to what’s infront of us, we can create another world, whole and divine. Or maybe reveal is a better word – that this hidden world exists beneath all our daily trials and distractions. In any case, the solitude of the bee-loud glade is where I’m headed when I first sit down with picture and a blank stave.

My friend Genevieve Anderson, an wonderful artist and filmmaker, had this quote of Albert Camus’ pinned up over her desk:

“A person’s life purpose is nothing more than to rediscover, through the detours of art or love or passionate work, those one or two images in the presence of which their heart first opened.”

Yeats’ roadway, Camus’ detour are part of the same journey to me – listening and looking for that moment of recognition, of resonance and rediscovery, the signpost that leads back home to that cabin by the lake.

The Lake Isle at 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 mourning 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.