Summary
The poet declares that he will arise and go to Innisfree,
where he will build a small cabin “of clay and wattles made.” There,
he will have nine bean-rows and a beehive, and live alone in the
glade loud with the sound of bees (“the bee-loud glade”). He says
that he will have peace there, for peace drops from “the veils of
morning to where the cricket sings.” Midnight there is a glimmer,
and noon is a purple glow, and evening is full of linnet’s wings.
He declares again that he will arise and go, for always, night and
day, he hears the lake water lapping “with low sounds by the shore.”
While he stands in the city, “on the roadway, or on the pavements
grey,” he hears the sound within himself, “in the deep heart’s core.”
Form
“The Lake Isle of Innisfree” is written mostly in hexameter,
with six stresses in each line, in a loosely iambic pattern. The
last line of each four-line stanza shortens the line to tetrameter,
with only four stresses: “And live alone in
the bee-loud glade.” Each of the
three stanzas has the same ABAB rhyme scheme. Formally, this poem
is somewhat unusual for Yeats: he rarely worked with hexameter,
and every rhyme in the poem is a full rhyme; there is no sign of
the half-rhymes Yeats often prefers in his later work.
Commentary
“The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” published in Yeats’s second
book of poems, 1893’s The
Rose, is one of his first great poems, and one of his most
enduring. The tranquil, hypnotic hexameters recreate the rhythmic
pulse of the tide. The simple imagery of the quiet life the speaker
longs to lead, as he enumerates each of its qualities, lulls the
reader into his idyllic fantasy, until the penultimate line jolts
the speaker—and the reader—back into the reality of his drab urban
existence: “While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey.”
The final line—“I hear it in the deep heart’s core”—is a crucial
statement for Yeats, not only in this poem but also in his career
as a whole. The implication that the truths of the “deep heart’s
core” are essential to life is one that would preoccupy Yeats for
the rest of his career as a poet; the struggle to remain true to
the deep heart’s core may be thought of as Yeats’s primary undertaking
as a poet.
