Department of English

Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

(1893)

William Butler Yeats

(June 13, 1865 – January 28, 1939)

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;

I hear it in the deep heart's core.

"The Lake Isle of Innisfree" Notes

W. B. Yeats

[poetic rhythm is] to prolong that moment of contemplation, when we are neither awake nor asleep

Metrical composition is always very difficult to me, nothing is done upon the first day, not a rhyme is in its place; and when at last the rhymes begin to come, the first rough draft of a six-line stanza takes the whole day.

From Autobiographies.  1955.  202.

You do not work at your technique.  You take the easiest course--leave out the rhymes or choose the most hackneyed rhymes, because--damn you--you are lazy...When your technique is sloppy your matter grows second-hand; there is no difficulty to force you down under the surface.  Difficulty is our plough.

From letter to Margo Collis, early April 1936.

Helen Vendler

There has been no volume in which students can find descriptions of the inner and outer formal choices Yeats made, the cultural significance his forms bore for him, or the way his forms--in all their astounding variety--became the material body of his thoughts and emotions.

From Vendler, Helen.  Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form.  Cambridge: Belknap, 2007.  Xv.

Reference and Further Reading

Ellmann, Richard.  Yeats: The Man and the Masks.

Jeffares, Norman.  A New Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats.

McCready, Sam.  A William Butler Yeats Encyclopedia.

Unterecker, John.  A Reader's Guide to William Butler Yeats.

Vendler, Helen.  Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form.  Cambridge: Belknap, 2007. (CL 821.8 V452O)

Yeats, W. B.  A Vision.

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Last updated August 2, 2010