"A bee-loud glade"

"For I shall have some peace there for peace comes dropping slow"

When I flew to Ireland for the first time, I wanted to see Yeat's Isle of Innisfree. I heard that if you could recite the whole poem, the barkeep gave you a large mug of beer--not, of course, that I would ever , . . . you know.

Just the name itself is poetry--"Inn- is- free." But, another director--who shall remain nameless--said we must hurry, didn't have time, Let's race through Ireland quickly, didn't want to see the squalor and poverty. Get to Scotland where we could buy lots of plaid to give away to relatives at Christmas (I don't have relatives who like plaid anything--not even plaid headbands made out of hippies.)

But, we had a Scottish bus driver who never missed the smallest tension on this trip. He loved drama of all kinds, and he whispered to me as I sulked my way onto the bus, "Don't you worry now, Cheron; I be getting you there."

And, he did. That sly hunk of a man drove into a nunnery, praising its antiquity and naming each tree we passed, then, he quickly pulled to the back of the convent and there--right smack in front of us--was the Isle of Innisfree, lying like a huge green seaweed lady, unconnected to either water or land, with the mist barely lifting. We could hear pots and pans rattling in the Convent kitchen, and the director saw he'd been tricked as the Scotsman made a great deal out of checking the back tires. Bless his trickster heart.

"Well, now that we're here," one-who-is-nameless said. "Let's have Sis Papworth (I think that was my name then--I've had so many it's often hard to keep track: tusk tusk.) tell us about William Butler Yeats.

I glowed. I beamed out sunlight. I walked to the shore barely touching the ground. Pure white adrenaline shot through my frontal brain lobe as I began to uncover and thus convert 28 students to Mr. W. B. Yeats, himself. Such excitement over sharing the pocket of my brain where I store Yeats along with Keats and other great poets ( I tend toward those who die young upon the ashes of their talents) can't be described. I have no words for the clean exchange of innocent beauty--in all its abstractness.

I recited the poem and others. I painted his portrait and his life with words. I lowered my voice as I spoke of the epitaph on his grave: "Horseman pass by." When I finished, and slowly emerged from my transcendental (slightly LSD flashback-like) state and looked around, my faith in students who take trips to Europe once again dropped like a dead fish.

But, . . . the Scotsman . . . that bus driving Scot stood still, transfixed, staring at me as of I were an angel from heaven or a mermaid crossed over from the green island. He walked through the students, around the other directors, and took hold of my hand. "That was a thing of beauty, Cheron, and I want to thank thee from the bottom of my heart for such a gift."

That's when I fell in love with all Scottish men. At least, anyway, the ones who don't have four letter, one word vocabularies.