Sunday, March 26, 2017

How will the speaker have peace at Innisfree?

In the poem "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" by William Butler Yeats, an anonymous narrator relates what appears to be a recurrent daydream. He imagines living on the isle of Innisfree and longs for a small cabin built of slender poles and clay. Outside, the cabin would be rows of beans and a beehive. The only sounds would be the buzzing of the bees and the lapping of waves on the shore of the island.
One source of the narrator's peace on Innisfree would be the solitude. He says he would "live alone" in the cabin in the glade. Another source of peace would be the quietness besides the natural sounds of the honey bees and the waves. Additionally, whether it was morning, noon, evening, or midnight, he would see the beauty of natural landscapes and colors.
In the last stanza of the poem, the narrator confesses that he longs for the cabin on the isle while he stands "on the roadway or on the pavements grey." In other words, he is somewhere in a town or city where he does not have access to these things that will bring him peace. That's why he dreams of them "in the deep heart's core" and imagining the lapping waters of the lake makes him want to "arise and go now."

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