The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I assume you are asking about William Butler Yeats's poem "The Lake Isle of Innisfree." This is a very evocative poem: the speaker is expressing his yearning to return to this place where he has so...

What the speaker hears is the call of Innisfree and the simple life lived close to nature that it represents. The speaker is profoundly dissatisfied with urban life, which is somehow less real,...

Yeats is altering both midnight and noon into eerie images. "There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet's wings." Here Yeats gives evening a...

In William Butler Yeats' poem "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," the speaker is in the city, "stand[ing] on ... the pavements gray," but is imagining his favorite place, which he calls Innisfree. The...

Let us remind ourselves that imagery is creating verbal pictures through the use of words that appeal to as many of the senses as possible to try and help us imagine the scene that the author or...

Yeats is a name of Celtic origin, which means that the "ea" dipthong should be pronounced to rhyme with rates and weights. In names with an Anglo-Saxon origin, like, for example, Keats, the "ea"...

In the first stanza of "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," the poet says that he hopes to have nine bean-rows and a hive for the honey-bee, so he can live alone in the bee-loud glade. Despite the noise...

At the end of the poem, the speaker says that he hears the sound of the waters of Lake Innisfree lapping gently at the shores. He also states that he hears this sound when he is standing on a...

Yeats imagines Innisfree as an idyllic place of peace and solitude. He imagines a "small cabin" of "clay and wattles" where he will support himself on beans and honey from his bee hive, and he will...

The speaker in Butler's "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" (1892) is clearly in the midst of an urban environment as he thinks about Innisfree: While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements...

One doesn't normally associate peace and action—be it "dropping" or anything else. Yet in this case, the line "peace comes dropping slow" indicates that, for the speaker, peace is not simply an...

The speaker of the poem fantasizes about leading a life of quiet repose in the wilderness. At the time when Yeats wrote "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" he was heavily influenced by Thoreau's Walden,...

Normally one needs to be careful not to attribute the words of a poem to the poet's own feelings because the poet could be writing in the voice of a "persona," a character whose feelings he or she...

The poem "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" tells of a daydream the poet has while he walks the streets of a city, as he says: "while I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey." He longs for a...

The poet yearns to go to the Lake Isle of Innisfree because he is seeking peace. On Innisfree he would be able to live alone in a small cabin, growing beans and keeping bees. He explicitly states...

As the poem opens, the speaker imagines going to the idyllic lake isle of Innisfree. In this first stanza, he envisions building a small house there and planting nine rows of beans. He also dreams...

In the first line of the poem, the persona or speaker expresses a determination more than a desire. The speaker states, “I will arise and go.” The destination given is Innisfree, which the speaker...

What the speaker "hears" in his deep heart's core is the sound of the lake water lapping against the shores of the lake isle of Innisfree. This line shows—or suggests—that the isle home he thinks...

I think Yeats wrote “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” not as an autobiographical poem, but rather from the imagined perspective of a country peasant. It is probably more correct, therefore, to talk...

Yeats does not tell us specifically where he is standing at that moment. Our only clue comes in the second to last line of the poem, which reads "While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements...

William Butler Yeats is perhaps Ireland's most famous poet, and is indeed considered one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. His subject matter embraced a number of topics, including love,...

The beautiful poem "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" by William Butler Yeats describes a daydream that the poet has while living in the midst of a city. He envisions living in solitude and building a...

Yeats, who was born near Dublin, Ireland, grew up as a child in the rural district of Sligo, on Ireland's northwestern coast. When he wrote "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" in the 1880s, he and his...

The cabin on the lake symbolizes the simple life, a life free of distraction and troubles. Symbolism is an object that has a meaning larger than itself. Just as the cabin is simple, “of clay and...

In this poem, the speaker wishes to go to Innisfree to obtain the peace and solitary pleasures of life. This place is the setting where Yeats spent his childhood years. Now situated in the...

The roadway and the pavement in Yeats's poem can be understood in two ways when looking at the context of the entire work. In "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," Yeats writes about a small cabin...

One of the reasons why this poem is so famous and has been such an enduring success is the way in which it uses assonance and alliteration to create haunting sound effects, resulting in a poem...

When Yeats wrote "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" he was very much under the influence of Thoreau. As with the author of Walden, Yeats found the ideal of leading a simple life close to nature most...

The poem appeals to the senses to help you appreciate the peaceful nature of the place described. In the beginning, the island is described and the speaker says he will build a house “of clay and...

The fact that the speaker repeats the line "I will arise and go now" suggests that he may only be fantasizing about actually going to the lake isle of Innisfree. He describes the place beautifully,...

The first line establishes that the speaker is not at Innisfree. In this line, he expresses his wish to go there: either in actuality or in his mind. Given his peaceful, idealistic description of...

The world the poet imagines is very simple and small and it would be located on the island of Innisfree in Ireland. It would have only one 'cabin' and the only inhabitant would be the poet himself....

In this poem by W.B. Yeats, the speaker declares his intention to go to Innisfree and build for himself a "small cabin" from natural materials, "clay and wattles." It is clear that the speaker...

William Butler Yeats’s father read to him as a child. Henry David Thoreau’s Walden Pond was among their favorites. References to this American classic are made in this poem, especially in the first...

Innisfree is a little island in a lake near the town of Sligo, on the north west coast of Ireland. When Yeats was a boy, he spent his summers in Sligo and sometimes rowed out to the island. As an...

Even if the reader doesn't know that the Lake Isle of Innisfree is an uninhabited island that lies within a large lake in County Sligo, Ireland, he or she can easily imagine what it is like from...

William Butler Yeats wrote the poem "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" about a pleasant island he remembered from his youth. In the poem, the poet imagines leaving the city and going to live in nature on...

The speaker says that, on the lake isle of Innisfree, peace will come "dropping slow," "Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings." This suggests that the calm and...

Yearning for peace in the company of nature is the most powerful thought in the poem. The poet is a man of city. What troubles him in the city is not specified. However, it’s understood that the...

In the final stanza, the speaker says, I will arise and go now, for always night and dayI hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements...

In William Butler Yeats's retrospective poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” the speaker longs for a place to quiet his mind. The poem was written when Yeats was living in London, but his heart was...

The significance of the title of this poem lies in the way that it captures and inspires the imagination, allowing the reader to summon up an image of pastoral beauty which stands in direct...

In all three stanzas, the speaker begins with the claim that he "will" or "shall" go to Innisfree, but it is only in the third stanza that he shifts to the present tense. He says "I hear the lake...

Let us remember that imagery is defined as the creation of pictures through the use of words. The best imagery is created through the incorporation of as many of the five sense as possible into the...

To me, the most serene image in the first two stanzas of "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" by William Butler Yeats is the "[midnight] all a glimmer". The calm and peace of nighttime alone with the...

According to the author of this poem, William Butler Yeats, this poem is autobiographical, so we know the speaker is the poet himself. Yeats explained that when he was in his early twenties, he was...