Today’s Poem: The Lake Isle of Innisfree

A prodigal on the alien pavements, sick for home

William Butler Yeats in 1903 (Wikimedia Commons)

It’s said that William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) came to loathe his early poem, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” written in 1888 during his sojourn in London among the Pre-Raphaelites. For the rest of his long life, this was the poem people exhorted him to read aloud, his greatest hit. Though he had the sort of reading voice that even he might have listened to all night with pleasure, still it’s not implausible that he tired of hearing himself begin, yet again, “I shall arise and go now, and go to Innisfree . . .”  

It’s also no surprise that of all his poems, this was the reliable crowd-pleaser. It’s a feel-good poem of the highest order, imagining a refuge of peace and goodness in a fallen world. As Dana Gioia has noted in his close reading of the poem, the phrase that opens the first and third stanzas echoes the resolution of the Prodigal Son of the parable, self-exiled and yearning for home: I shall arise and go. As we realize in the penu…