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

This poem is collected in the 1893 collection The Rose.

1  Innisfree: one of the islands in Lough Gill, Sligo County, Ireland; the name comes from the Irish words inis fraoigh meaning "heather island."

2  wattles:

• 1 [MASS NOUN] A material for making fences, walls, etc., consisting of rods or stakes interlaced with twigs or branches. (Oxford Dictionaries)

I am going to begin with a poem of mine called ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ because if you know anything about me you will expect me to begin with it. It is the only poem of mine which is very widely known. When I was a young lad in the town of Sligo I read Thoreau’s essays and wanted to live in a hut on an island in Lough Gill called Innisfree, which means ‘Heather Island.’ I wrote the poem in London when I was about twenty-three. One day in The Strand I heard a little tinkle of water and saw in a shop window a little jet of water balancing a ball on the top. It was an advertisement, I think, for [of?] cooling drinks. But it set me thinking of Sligo and lake water. I think there is only one obscurity in the poem. I speak of noon as a ’purple glow.’ I must have meant by that the reflection of heather in the water.

Meanwhile my beans, the length of whose rows, added together, was seven miles already planted, were impatient to be hoed, for the earliest had grown considerably before the latest were in the ground; indeed they were not easily to be put off. What was the meaning of this so steady and self-respecting, this small Herculean labor, I knew not. I came to love my rows, my beans, though so many more than I wanted. They attached me to the earth, and so I got strength like Antæus.⁴ But why should I raise them? Only Heaven knows. This was my curious labor all summer,—to make this portion of the earth's surface, which had yielded only cinquefoil, blackberries, johnswort, and the like, before, sweet wild fruits and pleasant flowers, produce instead this pulse. What shall I learn of beans or beans of me?⁷ I cherish them, I hoe them, early and late I have an eye to them; and this is my day's work. It is a fine broad leaf to look on. My auxiliaries are the dews and rains which water this dry soil, and what fertility is in the soil itself, which for the most part is lean and effete. My enemies are worms, cool days, and most of all woodchucks. The last have nibbled for me a quarter of an acre clean. But what right had I to oust johnswort and the rest, and break up their ancient herb garden? Soon, however, the remaining beans will be too tough for them, and go forward to meet new foes. [end of page 150]

W. B. Yeats on Writing Poetry

[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.

—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.

—Letter to Margo Collis, early April 1936.

Vendler on Yeats's Form

"Whatever I do," Yeats cried out in a 1926 letter, "poetry will remain a torture" (#4952). (1) [...]

"I always try for the most natural order possible, largely to make thought which being poetical always is difficult to modern people as plain as I can" (#1263). [...]

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. (xv)

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

Vocabulary

• visual imagery
• auditory imagery
• olfactory imagery
• gustatory imagery
• tactile imagery
• kinesthetic imagery
• organic imagery
• synesthetic imagery

rhyme

• end rhyme
• perfect rhyme, true rhyme
• internal rhyme

alliteration

consonance

Sample Student Responses to Yeats' "The Lake Isle of Innisfree"

Response 1:

Reference and Further Reading

Yeats, W. B. "The Lake Isle of Innisfree." The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. 2^nd ed. Edited by Richard J. Finneran, Scribner, 1996, p. 39.

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

    [CL 821.8 V452O]

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Last updated November 5, 2017