The Lake Isle of Innisfree
W. B. Yeats · 1888 · Three quatrains, long hexameter lines
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, And I hear it in the deep heart's core.
Meaning
A homesickness poem written on a London street; the island is real, but the escape is entirely acoustic.
Analysis
Yeats never leaves. The verbs are future — 'I will arise' — and the final stanza reveals the speaker standing on 'pavements grey'. The whole idyll is a daydream held in place by a sound.
The lines run long and unhurried, three or four beats past what English lyric usually allows, and that extra length is the poem's argument: rural time is slower time.
Notice how much of the escape is heard rather than seen — the bee-loud glade, the cricket, the linnet's wings, the lapping water. Yeats knew that sound memory outlasts visual memory, and he built the poem out of it.
Craft notes for your own writing
- Anchor nostalgia in sound, not scenery.
- Let line length imitate the pace of the world you are describing.
- Reveal the speaker's real location last.