I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made; Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
At one point or another, when the worries and commotion of the world lie heavy on our shoulders, most of us have experienced a desire to leave the world behind and retire to a place of peace. The Irish poet William Butler Yeats used that longing as the germ for one of his most well-known poems, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” composed in 1888.
An Imaginative Escape
However, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” written when Yeats was 23, isn’t a description of anything the poet ever actually did. Instead, it’s a powerful flight of the imagination, reminiscent of the lyrics of the Romantic poets who inspired Yeats. This flight was brought on by a surge of nostalgia when the poet was living in London. As Yeats recorded in his autobiography,“I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, 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.’”
The tinkling of the fountain reminded Yeats of the lapping of lake water, which echoed down through time and shook his heart, evoking nostalgia and longing. As prominent landmarks from the past, the lake and island represented to Yeats his childhood and youth, to which he wished he could return.
“The Lake Isle of Innisfree” can thus be read as a poem about homesickness, nostalgia, the passing of childhood, and the desire for peace away from the bustle of the city. It also contains half-hidden strains of folklore and mysticism, both of which were of great interest to Yeats.
In his memoirs, Yeats discussed a folk tale about the island in question. In the story, a magical tree with delectable fruit grew on the isle and was guarded by a monster. It was called the Danaan Quicken tree, so-named because of its connection to the Tuatha da Danaan, the fairies that were said to haunt the hills and glades and misty lakes of Ireland.
According to the legend, a young woman asked her lover to kill the monster and bring her the fruit of the tree—which he did. But then he ate some of the fruit and its potent power caused his death. Heartbroken, the maiden ate of the fruit too, and died. Yeats commented, “I do not remember whether I chose the island [for my imagined place of retreat] because of its beauty or for the story’s sake, but I was twenty-two or three before I gave up the dream.”
Hunter went on to say that to Yeats, the lake isle represented a retreat that was both physical and mystical, a lush and haunting natural landscape that reflected and symbolized an inner tranquility:
“Yeats’ lake isle is private and enclosed, in this case by the waters of Lough Gill. It is fertile, as the beans and bees clearly indicate. It is numinous, in that it is both a physical island and a state of mind created by that island. It is haunted by the mythical Tuatha da Danaan and is haunting to the speaker of the poem, as the last stanza clearly reveals.”
The final stanza of the poem brings the speaker back from his imaginative fantasy to the “real world” of the London streets. “I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore /While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey.”
Yeats thus creates a stark contrast between the modern, gray, industrial, materialistic city and the colorful, mythological, spiritual folklore embodied by the island, so brilliantly evoked by the lyrical language of the first two stanzas. For the speaker, the result of this contrast between modern and mystical is to highlight the tranquility of the vision and to internalize it more deeply: “I hear it in the deep heart’s core.”
Going Home
One final allusion in the poem deserves attention, and suggests that the peace the poet seeks is of this interior kind. English literature instructor and critic Chris Semansky pointed out that the opening line of the poem, “I will arise and go now”—which is repeated in the final stanza—echoes the language used in the New Testament parable of the prodigal son: “I will arise and go to my father” (Luke: 15:18). Semansky considered whether this Biblical allusion points to the poet’s desire to return home, do his family duty, yet also establish his individual identity as a poet.I’m not arguing that “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” is a crypto-Christian poem. Yeats himself wasn’t a conventionally practicing Christian. He seemed to adopt a mixture of various religious traditions. Nevertheless, as Semansky writes, through this Biblical allusion “Yeats, consciously or not, infuses the poem with religious weight.” This religious weight—coupled with the poem’s complex interplay between memory, landscape, longing, imagination, and fantasy—suggests that the peace the poet associates with Innisfree can only ultimately be attained through spiritual means.
