Writings

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.

W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) The Lake Isle of Innisfree ----

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'WHITHER, 0 whither, love, shall we go,

For a score of sweet little summers or so ?'

The sweet little wife of the singer said,

On the day that follow'd the day she was wed,

'Whither, 0 whither, love, shall we go ?

And the singer shaking his curly head

Turn'd as he sat, and struck the keys

There at his right with a sudden crash,

Singing, 'And shall it be over the seas

With a crew that is neither rude nor rash,

But a bevy of Eroses apple-cheek'd,

In a shallop of crystal ivory-beak'd,

With a satin sail of a ruby glow,

To a sweet little Eden on earth that I know,

A mountain islet pointed and peak'd;

Waves on a diamond shingle dash,

Cataract brooks to the ocean run,

Fairily-delicate palaces shine

Mixt with myrtle and clad with vine,

And overstream'd and silvery-streak'd

With many a rivulet high against the Sun

The facets of the glorious mountain flash

Above the valleys of palm and pine.'

'Thither, 0 thither, love, let us go.'

'No, no, no!

For in all that exquisite isle, my dear,

There is but one bird with a musical throat,

And his compass is but of a single note,

That it makes one weary to hear.'

`Mock me not! mock me not! love, let us go.'

'No, love, no.

For the bud ever breaks into bloom on the tree,

And a storm never wakes on the lonely sea,

And a worm is there in the lonely wood,

That pierces the liver and blackens the blood;

And makes it a sorrow to be.'

Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) English poet ‘The Islet’ ----

Look, stranger, at this island now

The leaping light for your delight discovers,

Stand stable here

And silent be,

That through the channels of the ear

May wander like a river

The swaying sound of the sea.

W.H. Auden (1907-1973). English poet. ‘Look, stranger, at this island now’ (1936). ----

....dawn came back and they were still in cities;

No marvellous creature rose up from the water;

There was still gold and silver in the mountains

But hunger was a more immediate sorrow,

Although to moping villages in valleys

Some waving pilgrims were describing islands.

W.H. Auden(1907-1973). English poet. ‘Paysage Moralisé’ (1933) ----

L’honneur est comme une île escarpée et sans bords: On n’y peut plus rentrer dès qu’on en est dehors.

[Honour is like an island, rugged and without shores; we can never re-enter it once we are on the outside.]

Nicolas Boileau (1636-1711). French poet. Satires, vol. X (1694) v. 167-168. ----

Are suffering grave problems of health

And even more, of self-identity.

For islands, being islands,

Are more fragile, more sensitive to disorder,

More vulnerable to outrages of every kind.

But man must come to his senses.

Inconsequential as he is, man can also be wise!

René Carmen. Iles (February 1993, No.26). ----

D'une manière générale, j'aime toutes les îles. Il est plus facile d'y régner.

[Generally, I like all islands. There, it is easier to rule.]

Albert Camus (1913–1960). French-Algerian novelist, dramatist, philosopher. ‘La chute/The Fall’ (1956). ----

No man is an island, entire of himself,

Every man is a piece of a continent, a part of the main.

John Donne (1572-1631) English poet. ‘Devotions upon Emergent Occasions’ (1624) (Meditation XVII

we are so many

and many within themselves

travel to far islands but no one

asks for their story....

Denise Levertov (b. 1923-1997). Anglo–U.S. poet, essayist and political activist. ‘In Abeyance’. ----

There were no lands of sunshine, heavy with the perfume of flowers.

Such things were only old dreams of paradise.

The sunlands of the West and the spicelands of the East,

the smiling Arcadias and blissful Islands of the Blest – ha! ha!

Jack London (1876-1916). American writer. ‘In a far country’ (1900). ----

It is time to plant

Feet in our earth.

The heart’s metronome

Insists on this arc of islands

As home.

Dennis Scott (1939-1991). Jamaican poet and dramatist., ‘Homecoming’

The advice I am giving always to all my students is above all to study the music profoundly. Because the music is like the ocean, and the instruments are little or bigger islands, very beautiful for the flowers and trees, or the contrary.

Andrés Segovia (1893-1987). Spanish classical guitarist. New York Times, (16 February 1964). ----

The shifting islands! who would not be willing that his house should be undermined by such a foe! The inhabitant of an island can tell what currents formed the land which he cultivates; and his earth is still being created or destroyed. There before his door, perchance, still empties the stream which brought down the material of his farm ages before, and is still bringing it down or washing it away,—the graceful, gentle robber!

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862). U.S. philosopher, author, naturalist. ‘A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers’ (1849), in ‘The Writings of Henry David Thoreau’, vol. 1, p. 259, Houghton Mifflin (1906). ----

The peace of white horses,

The pastures of ports,

The litany of islands,

The rosary of archipelagos.

Derek Walcott (born 1930). St. Lucian poet and playwright. ‘A Sea-Chantey’, in ‘In a Green Night’ (1962). ----

At the end of this sentence, rain will begin.

At the rain’s edge, a sail.

Slowly the sail will lose sight of islands;

Into a mist will go the belief in harbors of an entire race.

Derek Walcott (born 1930). St. Lucian poet and playwright. Archipelagoes. ----

Others will see the islands large and small;

Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half

an hour high.

A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others

will see them,

Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring-in of the flood-tide, the

falling-back to the sea of the ebb-tide.

It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not,

I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence,

Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,

Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,

Walt Whitman (1819–1892). U.S. poet. ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’ (l. 16–23). ----

Not in Utopia, -subterranean fields, -

Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!

But in the very world, which is the world

Of all of us, - the place where in the end

We find our happiness, or not at all!

William Wordsworth (1770-1850). English poet. ‘The Prelude’ (1850) bk. 12, 1. 204 ----

Source: adapted and expanded from Island Agenda : An Overview of UNESCO’s Work on Island Environments, Territories and Societies. UNESCO, Paris (1994)

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