ANALYSIS OF THE POEM:

“The Lake Isle of Innisfree”

The poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” was written in London in 1890 by the Irish poet W. B. Yeats,
and it’s about the achieving of peace and solitude, being at one with nature.

The poem is divided in three stanzas and each one is a quatrain, so the poem is twelve lines long.
Every stanza is about a different theme:

1. The first one is about the remembrance of the poet’s country (Ireland). The poet is
nostalgic and wants to go back to his loved mothercountry; it starts in first person;
2. The second one gives the reader a language of senses impressions that Ireland gave the
poet, such as the sight and the hearing (”cricket sings”, ”midnight’s all a glimmer”, ”a
purple glow”, ”linnet’s wings”);
3. The third and last one tells about where the poet actually is: he’s in London, in the middle
of the city, where everything is very concrete (there are roadways and grey pavements);
the poet give us no senses impression, differently from the second stanza.

So, we can find a contrast between the second and the third stanzas: the second is full of language
of the senses and gives us a feeling of peace and tranquility, while the third one has no language
about feelings, it’s very concrete and gives us a feeling of stress, probably caused by the urban life.
So there is the contras between the life the poet is doing (the urban one) and the life he would be
happy to do or even better will do in the future (the one at Innisfree, where he will (or would)
build a small cabin “of clay and wattles made”, will have nine bean-rows and a beehive and live
alone in the glade loud with the sound of bees).

In this poem the rhymes are alternated, so the scheme that has been used is the ABAB (an so on)
one. One example of one rhyme is: Innisfree, made, honey-bee, glade.

In the first stanza we can find two figures of speech: the alliteration (lines 2-3, with the repetitions
of letters c and h) and the inversion of the order of the words in a phrase (“Nine bean-rows will I
have there”). Alliteration is also used in lines 7 (repetition of letters “gl”), 10 (repetition of letter l),
and 12 (repetition of letter h). In the phrase "where the cricket sings" (line 6) personification is
used for giving the cricket the human ability to sing, which a cricket cannot do. There is an
onomatopoeia in line 10, using the verb “lapping” to describe a sound with a word. The poem
does not have a fixed poetic form, since the lines have different syllables length.

In all the poem we can find some first person verbs referred to the actions that the poet does or
would like to do, which are also repeated (”I will arise and go now”, ”I will”, ”I hear”). Particularly,
“I will arise and go now” and “I hear” are two refrains. There are also other repetition of words,
which are “peace” and “dropping”.