The Lake Isle of Innisfree (1926)
Most widely recognised for her beloved Christmas carol 'Jesus Christ the Apple Tree', Poston’s musical career began at the Royal Academy of Music, where her compositional talent was supported by Peter Warlock and Ralph Vaughan Williams. Having moved her studies abroad throughout the 1930s, Poston returned to England as World War II approached and, soon after, was appointed Director of Music for the European Service at the BBC. It is rumoured that she worked as a secret agent during this time: using gramophone records to broadcast coded musical messages to resistance movements in Europe - although the exact nature of this work remains a secret.
'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' is an influential poem by William Butler Yeats, so symbolic of Celtic imagery and ideals that it features in Irish passports. The Isle is uninhabited, located in Lough Gill to the north-west of Ireland, near where Yeats spent his summers as a child. His poem expresses a profound yearning to be at one with nature, to escape urban life for the peace and tranquility of Innisfree. Poston’s rendition was dedicated to her composition teacher Julius Harrison, and has not been commercially recorded until now.
Composer: Elizabeth Poston (1905-1987)
Poet: W. B. Yeats (1865-1939)
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 gray,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
03:48