Essay On The Lake Isle Of Innisfree

“The Lake Isle of Innisfree” is a poem composed by William Butler Yeats in 1888, and first published in the National Observer in 1890. Additionally, the poem also appeared in Yeats’ second book of poems, The Rose, in 1893. “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” consists of 12 lines, with the lines divided into three quatrains of four lines each. There is an actual Lake Isle of Innisfree, located near the coast of Ireland in Lough Gill, a lake in County Sligo. The island is approximately five and a half miles long, one and a half miles wide, and currently uninhabited. As a child in the summers, when William Butler Yeats was staying in his mother’s hometown in Ireland, he would visit this island. The Lake Isle of Innisfree was a special place for Yeats,

They decide to leave to take a break from the chaos of life and go to where they love, Innisfree. While they are on the island, they say they will build a cabin, made up of clay and wattles, which is a material for making fences, consisting of stakes interlaced with branches. Living in this cabin, the speaker can stay on the island they love forever. The speaker can return to nature and grow beans, and make hives for bees. The stanza closes with the narrator living alone, listening to the bees buzzing and working. In London, where Yeats lived, life was constantly noisy. In “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” Yeats is reflecting on when he visited the island as a child and could relax without any obnoxious noise. Yeats is imagining returning to Innisfree and hearing the drone of the bees instead of the drone of humans in the London clamor. This first stanza speaks to the needs of his body, like food and

In the first line, the speaker states that they are arising and going to Innisfree now, which they also repeat from the first stanza. When they say “for always night and day,” the speaker is preoccupied by imagining of going to Innisfree. They imagine all day and night of traveling to the place they love. They also say they can hear water lapping. The speaker is longing to travel to Innisfree so strongly, they are hearing what they would hear on the island. He wants to hear water in a lake rather than the noise of where he lives. In the next line, the speaker is standing on the pavement that is the road. This is what the speaker least wants; they want to be on the rural island of Innisfree, not in the city on the gray pavement. This also proves how much they love the island, if they can be submersed in the sounds and experiences of Innisfree while in the least desirable place to be. The final line is, “I hear it in the deep heart’s core.” The speaker hears the water lapping lapping on the shore in their heart. They do not simply imagine the place; they live and experience this place everyday. There is a voice calling to them from within: a calling for them to return to Innisfree. When they say in the core, they could also mean the earth’s core, or nature calling for them to return to Innisfree. The speaker longs for the place in his dreams, but