7/28/2019 Analysis of the Lake Isle of Innisfree

1/3

7/28/2019 Analysis of the Lake Isle of Innisfree

2/3

Throughout the three short quatrains the poem explores the speakers longing fo

the peace and tranquility of his boyhood haunt, Innisfree, while residing in an urba

setting.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree suggests that a life of simplicity in nature will brin

peace to the troubled speaker. However, the poem is the speakers recollection o

Innisfree, and therefore the journey is an emotional and spiritual escape rather than a

actual one.

Innisfree may be a symbol for the speakers passed youth, which the speaker i

unable to return to in the real, or physical, world. Emotionally, the speaker can retur

again and again to the tranquility of Innisfree.

The speaker in this poem yearns to return to the island of Innisfree because of thpeace and quiet it affords. He can escape the noise of the city and be lulled by the "lak

water lapping with low sounds by the shore." On this small island, he can return to natur

by growing beans and having bee hives, by enjoying the "purple glow" of noon, th

sounds of birds' wings, and, of course, the bees. He can even build a cabin and stay o

the island much as Thoreau, theAmerican Transcendentalist, lived on Walden Pond

William Butler Yeats' poem "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" describes a sort of utopithat the narrator wishes to escape to.

He wishes to leave the city and go to a remote place where life is simple, th

beauty of mother-nature all around.

It is a place where one lives off of the land, so consumerism doesn't exist. Yeats

wrote this poem after passing a display on Fleet Street in London. Yeats writes in hi

autobiography "I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation o

Thoreau on Innisfree...and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard

little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop-window which balanced a little ball upo

its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came m

poem Innisfree, my first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music". This poe

was written in 1888, and was published in the "National Observer" in 1890.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoreauhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Stateshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendentalisthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldenhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoreauhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Stateshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendentalisthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walden

7/28/2019 Analysis of the Lake Isle of Innisfree

3/3

Yeats attempted "to create a form ofpoetry that was Irish in origin rather than on

that adhered to the standards set by English poets and critics"

Yeats used sounds found in nature (bees, crickets, and water lapping) to mak

Innisfree appear to be peaceful and tranquil.

There is a pause in the middle of the first three lines of every stanza; Yeats doe

this to slow the reader down, so that they can feel the calm that his lines are expressing

Alliteration is also used in this poem (look at the bolded letters in the poem). Its

rhyme pattern is abab cdcd efef.

http://voices.yahoo.com/theme/1610/poetry.htmlhttp://voices.yahoo.com/theme/1610/poetry.html