The Lake Isle of Innisfree

The opening echoes the Prodigal Son's 'I will arise and go to my father.' Innisfree is a real island in Lough Gill, County Sligo, where Yeats spent childhood summers. The 'clay and wattles' cabin is deliberately primitive—a rejection of urban modernity for an idealized rural simplicity.

The biblical cadence of 'I will arise and go' gives the declaration a ceremonial weight. The inversion 'a small cabin build there' follows Irish English syntax. 'Clay and wattles' are ancient building materials, evoking a pre-industrial Ireland. Yeats wrote this while homesick in London, hearing a fountain that reminded him of lake water.

The specificity of 'nine bean-rows' grounds the fantasy in practical detail—this is not mere escapism but imagined self-sufficiency. 'Bee-loud glade' is one of Yeats's most celebrated coinages: the compound adjective makes the sound of bees the defining quality of the place. It is nature as music.

'Nine bean-rows' is precise and domestic, inspired by Thoreau's bean-field at Walden. The compound 'bee-loud' is Yeats's invention and his most famous auditory image—the glade is defined by the sound that fills it. Living 'alone' is the Romantic ideal of solitary communion with nature.

'Peace comes dropping slow' transforms an abstract state into a physical sensation—peace as dew or gentle rain. The 'veils of the morning' recalls Celtic mist but also suggests a spiritual unveiling. The cricket anchors the mystical in the particular: this is specific, local peace, not philosophical abstraction.

The repetition of 'dropping' creates the very slowness it describes. 'Veils of the morning' is both literal mist and metaphor for the boundary between waking and dreaming. The movement from sky ('veils of the morning') to ground ('where the cricket sings') enacts the descent of peace from the ethereal to the earthly.

Three times of day, each with its defining sensory quality: midnight glimmers (starlight on water), noon glows purple (heather in summer), evening is filled with bird flight. Yeats creates a complete diurnal cycle in two lines, suggesting that every moment on Innisfree holds beauty. The linnet's wings are both visual and auditory.

Each time-period gets a single defining image: midnight as light ('glimmer'), noon as color ('purple glow'), evening as motion ('linnet's wings'). The progression from sight to color to movement creates an accelerating sensory experience. 'Full of the linnet's wings' is synecdoche—the whole evening defined by one part of one bird.

The refrain 'I will arise and go now' gains urgency in repetition. 'Always night and day' reveals that this isn't future planning but present torment—the lake's sound haunts him constantly. The alliterative 'lake water lapping with low sounds' is onomatopoeia at its most subtle: the 'l' sounds lap like water.

The return of the opening phrase creates a circular structure appropriate to a poem about longing. The 'l' alliteration in 'lake water lapping with low sounds' is masterful sound-painting. Yeats confessed this line came to him on a London street when he heard water trickling in a shop-window fountain.

The devastating final couplet reveals the speaker's reality: he stands on grey urban pavement, not on Innisfree's shore. The poem's pastoral vision is a dream heard only 'in the deep heart's core.' This ending transforms the poem from escapist fantasy into an elegy for an unattainable ideal, which is what makes it genuinely moving rather than merely pleasant.

The abrupt shift from lush nature imagery to 'roadway' and 'pavements grey' is the poem's emotional turn. The inversion 'pavements grey' (rather than 'grey pavements') places the bleakness at the line's end for emphasis. 'Deep heart's core' moves inward through three degrees of interiority: the sound lives not in the heart, not in the heart's center, but in the core of the core. The island exists only within.