THE LAKE ISLE OF INNISFREEE

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 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.

William Butler Yeats (1890, 1892)

Taken from  http://www.uv.es/~fores/poesia/lakeisle.html

 

 

William Butler Yeats is an author placed between the nineteenth and the twentieth century and “fue el máximo representante del renacimiento irlandés, y uno de los escritores más sobresalientes del siglo XX. (…) Escribió poemas líricos y simbólicos sobre temas paganos irlandeses, como El peregrinaje de Oisin (1889) y La isla del lago de Innisfree (1893), en un tono romántico y melancólico que él creía característico de los celtas”. The main topic we can find in this poem is a journey to isolation, but isolation here does not mean a negative thing, as I will analyze later.

(www.epdlp.com/escritor.php?id=2454)

 

The vocabulary is quite difficult (clay, wattles, bee-loud glade, linnet) so I needed a Spanish translation of the poem to do this paper. Now I would like to comment the structure and the rhyme in the poem. The work is composed of three stanzas containing four verses each one. Some of the lines are very long, what gives a poem an appearance of narration, using several commas, but the author gives a particular characteristic to each stanza: the last line in each stanza is much shorter than the rest of the lines. With respect to the rhyme, rhyme is the same for the whole poem and it’s very simple, being ABAB.

 

The topics narrated in this poem are a purpose of isolation for the author, because Innisfree is a legendary Irish place, a small town placed in the heart of Ireland, full of natural life with great and screen landscapes, where Yeats wants to arrive “And I live alone in the bee-loud glade”. This place has already been used by literature, first, and later and specially by cinema, with The quiet man, an outstanding John Ford’s film, starring John Wayne. In this film, the main character arrives at Innisfree with the intention of forgetting some events from his past and start a new and quiet life. As we can see, this man has the same purpose than the person used by Yeats in his poem (it’s maybe himself). So it’s clear than Innisfree is a place for resting and having some moments of calmness, as Yeats writes in the first line of the second stanza, “And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow”. Then Innisfree is only one of these places where people go to forget their problems, at least for some hours. Everybody has a place like Innisfree where to go when you are overwhelmed with problems at work, at home or with your boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife, etc. This place can be anywhere: seaside, where you can listen to the waves as you get relaxed, or the top of a mountain from which to contemplate your whole town and to breath open and pure air.

 

The two verses I have quoted have a similar characteristic: they are written in first person singular. The whole poem is written in this way, what expresses not only an aesthetic intention by Yeats to write a good poem, it expresses a real desire and a great conviction for the author to go to Innisfree. The word “I”, together with “and” (eight and seven times, respectively) are the most repeated words in the poem. This fact gives the poem an appearance of individualism in the author (“And live alone in the bee-loud glade”) and of not to stop when you have decided something about your life (“I will arise and go now, for always night and day”).

 

In the second stanza, Yeats quotes the four parts of the day: “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 the linnet’s wings”. The author of the poem describes how every part of the day is in Innisfree and, at the same time, he expresses how he feels at every part of the day. It is expressed in contrast, first with the morning, and the (mid)night, and later with the noon (midday) and the evening.

 

To finish, I would like to comment the three last lines in the poem, because I think they are the essence of the meaning of the poem: “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”. Here Yeats expresses his desire perfectly to arrive at Innisfree. When you are going to the place you want to arrive to get relaxed and forget all your problems, you think how the experience of arriving at that place will be, your personal place.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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