The Lake Isle of Innisfree

William Butler Yeats

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

“The Lake Isle of Innisfree” is a modernist poem published in Yeats’s second volume of poetry, entitled “The Rose” (1893) and, although simple in form and imagery, it has managed to earn its place as one of his great literary achievements and one of his most enduring. The poem represents a nostalgic description of a concrete, geographical place, the lake isle of Innisfree, which the poet manages to transform into a magical landscape, full of symbols and beautiful elements of nature.

The imagery of the poem creates an atmosphere of melancholy, due to the many references to a faraway, idyllic place, but also a feeling of hope and serenity, because of the speaker’s certainty that this isle, this wonderful part of nature, is the best escape from the stress and agitation of the every day life in the city.

The poem represents the speaker’s recollection of an excursion in the middle of a wild, uncorrupted corner of the world and manages to embark the readers on the same boat with him, determining them to leave behind every aspect of daily life and allow oneself to dream of this kind of special place every once in a while.

The isle is presented as a place of refuge, of calm and serenity. Every stanza brings in front of the reader’s eyes more and more images that the poet manages to charge with beautiful suggestive powers in spite of their apparent simplicity. It is the poet’s impressive ability to combine different elements and to appeal to the reader’s imagination that makes this poem so special. It is a continuous process which grows and overwhelms the reader line by line.

Through the many visual and auditive images, the lake isle of Innisfree seems to reveal itself like through magic in front of the reader’s eyes.” Instead of establishing a distance between speaker and reader, Yeats fuses the reader’s perspective into the speaker’s memory of a detached and physically separate island. The fact that Yeats’s speaker never actually goes to Innisfree during the poem is crucial to the development of this union between the speaker and the reader. The speaker’s physical separation from Innisfree, even when describing its most intimate details, allows the reader an important degree of accessibility to the isle and, subsequently, to the memory of the speaker. It is this new perspective created by the fusion of the speaker’s memory and the reader’s imagination that eventually allows Yeats to take us from the mundane reality of London’s “pavements grey” to the collective remembering of Innisfree’s “deep heart’s core” and back again in only twelve lines.”(Peter J. Capuano, 146)

In the first line the poet expresses his determination to arise and go to Innisfree, where he will build a “small cabin” of “clay and wattles made”. There, he will have nine bean-rows and a bee-hive, and live alone in the glade, loud with the sound of bees. In this stanza we can easily observe the speaker’s longing for a simple life in the middle of nature. The cabin that he wants to live in is small, made only of clay and wattles, which underlines his yearning to live as the primitive people, as close to nature and the surroundings as possible. He wants to feed only on what nature provides, like beans, honey, and listen to the murmur of natural life in the background. Thus, the quiet, calm atmosphere in the beginning of the poem is disturbed only by the presence of the “bee-loud glade”, an extraordinary poetic image, due to this combination of auditive and visual images in only one compound word, resulted from the association of connected natural elements,” bee”, “glade” with the adjective “loud”. This image proves Yeats’s ability to create a very suggestive literary painting which appeals to almost all the senses, giving great power to the simplest words.

What draws attention to this first stanza is the way in which “the provisional nature of Yeats’s verb choice, established in the first “will arise” and extending throughout the stanza, establishes a crucial point of access for the reader. The speaker “will” build a small cabin and “will” have nine bean-rows upon his arrival at the island. Since the ordering of new life at Innisfree has not yet occurred, Yeats allows his reader a participatory, or at least anticipatory, role in the various activities required to imagine living “alone in the bee-loud glade.” In this sense, Yeats joins the reader’s imagination and the speaker’s memory in the “going”