that is what the poet does as he writes about a place he aches to go. Standing in the middle of a bustling, lively place (probably Dublin in 1893) seems to drive him all the way to Innisfree.

The speaker desires to be someplace other than where he is. These feelings are not unique to Yeats. As children, we all have special memories of places we thought were the grandest places on earth.

Yeats actually proposes in his mind to go to the isle and build himself a cabin, much like the one Thoreau proposed to erect. The poem's speaker says,

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree

and a small cabin build there, of clay.

When the speaker completes his cabin made from sticks, he is going to plow a garden with nine rows of some kind of beans. To finish off his paradise, a bee colony will provide him with honey.

This is a man who aches for solitude. He enjoys the idea of listening to nothing but bees. He yearns for Innisfree, where he can be himself and rest unperturbed "and live alone in the bee-loud glade.”

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 about what the speaker, rather than the poet, plans to do in Innisfree.

In Innisfree, the speaker plans to be self-sufficient. He plans to build his own home, “a small cabin,” and grow his own food (“Nine bean-rows will I have there”). Innisfree is an uninhabited island in Ireland, and the speaker wants to live there alone, implying that he is fed up with people. Indeed, he wants to go to Innisfree because he believes that he “shall have some peace there.” He also expresses a desire to listen to and be at one with the natural world. He wants to live “alone in a bee-loud glade” and listen to the “lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore.”

To fully understand or appreciate what the speaker plans to do in Innisfree, it is helpful to understand what he wants to escape. In the third stanza, he contrasts the aforementioned sound of the “lake water lapping” with the implied noise of “the roadway” and “pavements grey.” In other words, he seems to be fed up with the hustle, bustle and noise of the city, and so longs for the peace and quiet of the country.

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. He himself would build that cabin out of “clay and wattles.” He would have a little bean garden and a beehive for honeybees.

 There midnight would “glimmer” and noon would have “a purple glow.” In the evening a swarm of linnets would visit his place. His imagined world has a dreamy and fairy tale-like ambience which is often dreamt by us when we are fed up with the monotony and dreariness of our existence.

The reason to shift to another world is simple - it’s for peace. At the start of the second stanza, the poets states,

.“And I shall have some peace there...”

Longing for a life in the company of nature away from the din of cities has been a common theme in the Romantic poetry. TheLake Isle of Innisfree, composed in 1888, typifies the features of late romanticism as it takes up this theme of escape to nature as its central thought.

Though the poet doesn't specify what actually bothers him in the city, it is understood that he wants to escape the mechanical and monotonous routine of urban life. He longs for a state of tranquility where he would discover and experience the inner peace that the hullabaloo of the city has always denied him.

He longs to explore and experience the spiritual joy that Henry David Thoreau did in his over two year long isolated stay in the woods near Walden Pond. In his autobiography, Yeats admits that he draws inspiration from Thoreau, who was an American poet, essayist, philosopher and a leading transcendentalist, wishes to ‘imitate’ him,

“I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill…’

In his childhood days, the poet loved to visit the lake in the summer. This poem is ripe with the element of nostalgia.

It is clear that the poet wants to escape from the restlessness and business of urban life. He wishes to seclude himself in the serene and tranquil world of nature where there would no sign of industrialization and modernity. Even his house would be made of clay and wattles. The songs of crickets and the buzzing of bees would replace the clamor of the city.  His only job would be to observe the graceful nature and revel in the spiritual experience.

For Yeats, this tranquil, natural part of his childhood remembrances of an innocent Ireland are a refuge, and in first stanza he is wishfully conjuring a peaceful life, perhaps a kind of retirement, in the peaceful lake country, far from the urban, political struggles in his adulthood, where he could live a simple farmer’s life, enjoying the tastes and sounds of nature.  He imagines a very modest cottage home, “of clay and wattles made”, and a solitary life (he had lost his one life-long love, Maude Gunn).  The tone of the poem echoes his melancholy and contrasts with his more ambitious poems that speak to Ireland’s political struggles and his fame as an Irish spokesman.  His picture is made all the more vivid by the first line: “I will arise and go…”  as though he is sitting or even lying in bed thinking about a better future.