The lake Isle of Innisfree

Opening comments

• 3 basic stanzas …4 lines each• A common poetic theme – the desire to escape the

drab misery of the city and live in harmony with nature.• Lots of sound and stunning visuals.• Plenty of effective alliteration and assonance

throughout.• From Yeats early period.• Language is easy and accessible.• Regular rhyming scheme – abab, cdcd, efef

1• Yeats opens with a biblical reference (“I will arise and go

now…”) taken from the parable of the prodigal son, suggesting the depth of the speaker’s desire to escape from the city to nature.

• He depicts an idealised hermetic existence– He will live alone in a cabin “from clay and wattles made”– He will grow beans and keep honey bees whose humming will fill the

glade.– All very nice, romanticised, idealised.

• Note the assonance and alliteration throughout emphasising the peace and serenity of the environment

2• This stanza focuses on the peace the speaker expects to

find there. It has a gentle, calm quality…it descends upon the soul like the morning dew settles upon the grass.

• The imagery here is particularly beautiful. Peace is described as “dropping slow…from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings”.

• On Innisfree, he tells us, midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, and evening full of the linnet’s wings.– This last line combines sound and visuals. We can both hear

and see the linnets in the evening sky.• Again, the stanza is rich in sound effects. Note a

combination of long vowel sounds and assonance which emphasise the gentle beauty of the environment.

3• Yeats returns to his opening line, his statement of

deep desire, and adds “for always night and day” he hears the sound of lake water lapping gently in his soul.

• Note the completeness of this desire. It’s “always” present…“night and day”.

• The sound of the water is of course a metaphor for the ever present desire to escape from the world represented by the “roadway” and “the pavements grey”. Notice, once more, the use of assonance and alliteration for emphasis.

• The “deep hearts core” represents the deepest level of his being.

conclusion• The poem uses beautiful, gentle rhythms to

generate an almost ethereal or dreamy quality. This fits in nicely with the almost sleepy peace and calm in the 2nd stanza. Lots of long, broad vowel sounds contribute to this.

• Nature in the poem is idealised. This was common in Romantic literature which portrayed nature as an almost heavenly alternative to the modernity of the times.

• Although escapist and unrealistic in its material expression the poem expresses the deep longing of the soul for peace and for beauty.