Context: This poem belongs to that period in Yeats' work which has been called "the Celtic twilight." At that time he was deeply interested in the Irish revival and was using, in his poetry, a great deal of both Irish mythology and Irish scenery in the effort to find new poetic material. Innisfree is an island in Lough Gill in County Sligo. In this–perhaps his most famous–poem, Yeats uses the island as a symbol both of the escape from the modern world and of the return to the simple rural life of an earlier day. The poem begins: