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 penultimate line, the soul-comfort of the poem’s vision is undercut by the speaker’s sense of his banishment from that vision, the grim inescapable presence of those “pavements grey.” That he resolves to “arise and go now” does not mean that he does, or can, escape, but only that he longs to, with a longing that makes the longed-for place more real in imagination than the comfortless present city of his exile. 

There is an actual Lake Isle of Innisfree. (Wikimedia Commons)

For most of the poem’s twelve lines, that place does exist, shining and almost reachable, in the evocative liquid sounds of its hexameter lines, dropping to tetrameter at the end of each abab quatrain. There’s a quality in these longer lines of, simultaneously, languor and urgency: the timelessness of the place, the exiled speaker’s haste to get there.

But can such a place exist? This poem, despite its maker’s dyspeptic later opinion of it, saves itself from the poisoning of nostalgia in its last lines. This Innisfree is real, more real even than the physical islet in the actual Irish lake — but only in one man’s “deep heart’s core,” where he carries the memory, which has become his own creation. It exists, but nowhere in external reality. You might want to arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, but you can’t get there from here.

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The Lake Isle of Innisfree 

by William Butler Yeats 

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. 

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