THE LAKE ISLE OF INNISFREE

W .B YEATS Analysis of The Lake Isle of Innisfree The "Lake Isle of Innisfree" is a poem written by William Butler Yeats in 1888. He remembers Innisfree as an utopia that would supply all his needs. His memory tricks him into thinking it had a beautiful summer climate all year round. First published in the collection The Rose in 1893, The Lake Isle of Innisfree is an example of Yeatss earlier lyric poems.

Throughout the three short quatrains the poem explores the speakers longing for the peace and tranquility of his boyhood haunt, Innisfree, while residing in an urban setting. The Lake Isle of Innisfree suggests that a life of simplicity in nature will bring peace to the troubled speaker. However, the poem is the speakers recollection of Innisfree, and therefore the journey is an emotional and spiritual escape rather than an actual one. Innisfree may be a symbol for the speakers passed youth, which the speaker is unable to return to in the real, or physical, world. Emotionally, the speaker can return again and again to the tranquility of Innisfree. The speaker in this poem yearns to return to the island of Innisfree because of the peace and quiet it affords. He can escape the noise of the city and be lulled by the "lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore." On this small island, he can return to nature by growing beans and having bee hives, by enjoying the "purple glow" of noon, the sounds of birds' wings, and, of course, the bees. He can even build a cabin and stay on the island much as Thoreau, the American Transcendentalist, lived on Walden Pond.

William Butler Yeats' poem "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" describes a sort of utopia that the narrator wishes to escape to. He wishes to leave the city and go to a remote place where life is simple, the 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 his autobiography "I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree...and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop-window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem Innisfree, my first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music". This was written in 1888, and was published in the "National Observer" in 1890. poem

Yeats attempted "to create a form of poetry that was Irish in origin rather than one that adhered to the standards set by English poets and critics" Yeats used sounds found in nature (bees, crickets, and water lapping) to make Innisfree appear to be peaceful and tranquil. There is a pause in the middle of the first three lines of every stanza; Yeats does 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). rhyme pattern is abab cdcd efef. Its