The Lake Isle of Innisfree by William Butler Yeats

First published: 1890; collected in The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics, 1892

Type of poem: Lyric

The Poem

“The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” a twelve-line poem divided into three quatrains, is a study in contrasts. The most obvious contrast is between two places: one rural (identified in the title and described throughout much of the poem), the other (alluded to only in the second-to-last line)—by implication—urban.

Innisfree is a small island at the eastern end of Lough Gill in County Sligo, Ireland. William Butler Yeats spent part of nearly every year in Sligo while growing up; he often walked out from Sligo town to Lough Gill. His father having read to him from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854), he daydreamed (as he says in The Trembling of the Veil, 1922, incorporated into his Autobiography, 1965) of living “a life of lonely austerity…in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree.” In 1890, while living in London, he was “walking through Fleet Street very homesick [when] I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop-window…and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem Innisfree.”

Yeats imagines escaping from the city to the solitude and peace of a pastoral retreat, there to live a simple life, close to nature. The first stanza states his intention and provides a prospectus for the home he will make for himself, specifying the rustic construction for his cabin and exactly how many rows of beans he will plant. The second stanza, more fancifully imagining what living there will be like, pauses over images that he associates with four different times of day: morning, midnight, noon, and evening. The third stanza reiterates his intention and for the first time suggests what motivates it: the (implied) urban setting and Yeats’s nostalgia for Sligo.

The contrast between the matter-of-fact first and last stanzas and the fanciful middle stanza reinforces the contrast between the quotidian city, with its “grey” pavements, and the idealized country. The opening stanza employs no figurative language; the only figurative language in the closing stanza is the sound of waves “lapping” in “the deep heart’s core.” Otherwise, the language in these stanzas is straightforward and literal, emotionally neutral.

The second stanza, on the other hand, is brimming with metaphors and other figures: “peace comes dropping slow,” as if it were dew; the morning wears “veils”; the cricket “sings”; the “evening [is] full of the linnet’s wings.” Language, imagination, and emotion all rise to a rapturous brief climax in this middle stanza before subsiding. The opening words of stanza 3, echoing the opening words of the poem, cue a return to the everyday world.

Forms and Devices

The poem’s rhyme scheme is regular; all of its rhymes are exact. In each stanza, the first three lines are in hexameter, the last line in tetrameter. In these respects, the poem is perfectly regular. Its meter is iambic, though only the last line of the poem precisely conforms to the iambic pattern. In each of the other eleven lines, Yeats introduces an extra unstressed syllable just after the midpoint, and the extra syllable is in each case a one-syllable word: “now” in line 1; “there” in lines 2, 3, and 5; and so forth. Virtually all of these words could be deleted without altering the meaning of the poem. Their purpose, clearly, is to contribute not to the poem’s meaning but to its sound and its tempo.

Yeats called “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” “my first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music. I had begun to loosen rhythm as an escape from rhetoric.” The added syllables in lines 1 through 11 contribute to this loosening of rhythm (line 3 adds still another syllable; line 6 adds two more syllables); so, too, does Yeats’s occasional relaxation of and variation from the basic iambic pattern. The loosening of rhythm prevented the poem’s meter from being too mechanical. Absolutely regular cadence produces a monotonous, singsong effect (an aspect of what Yeats called “rhetoric”); and Yeats’s “own music” was not timed by a metronome.

If “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” has something of Yeats’s “own music” in it, it is not—he later realized—fully in his own voice. When he wrote the poem, he was young, and, as he recalled, “I only understood vaguely and occasionally that I must for my special purpose use nothing but the common syntax. A couple of years later I would not have written that first line with its conventional archaism—‘Arise and go’—nor the inversion of the last stanza.”

“Arise and go” (in line 9 as well as line 1) echoes the parable of the homesick Prodigal Son: “I will arise and go to my father” (Luke 15:18). Alexander Norman Jeffares points out that line 9 also echoes Mark 5:5: “And always, night and day, he was in the mountains” (A Commentary on the Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, 1968). Such scriptural sonorities, added to the Thoreauvian quality of the first stanza’s humble images and the self-consciously “poetic” diction of the second stanza (“the veils of the morning” for fog and dew; “all a glimmer”), render the poem more literary, more “conventional” than a more mature Yeats would prefer.