“The Lake Isle of Innisfree” is a poem by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats. It was written in 1888 when Yeats was living in London. It was first published in the National Observer in 1890 and reprinted in Yeats’s collection The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics in 1892. What is less commonly known is that the poem was originally part of an early draft of Yeats’s short novel John Sherman, published in 1891. In the novel, the main character moves from the calm Irish countryside to the harsh metropolis of London.
The poem contains three stanzas of four lines each. Though it does not strictly follow any particular poetic form, the poem’s ballad-like meter and rich rhymes make it highly memorable. In Yeats’s words, it was his first poem that captured his “own rhythm.” It is one of Yeats’s most famous poems. There is a well-known BBC recording in which the poet reads the poem aloud to show its unique sound. The first two lines of the poem are printed in Irish passports.
The poem is named after an island lake in Lough Gill in County Sligo of western Ireland. Yeats spent time in this part of the Irish countryside as a child. In the poem, the speaker dreams of going to Innisfree and building a cabin. He wants to plant beans and tend to bees. He says that living there within nature will give him peace and he describes the island’s many natural features. In the last stanza, it becomes clear that the speaker is not in Innisfree but in a large city. He wishes to leave urban life behind and return to the beauty of rural Ireland.
“The Lake Isle of Innisfree” is associated with the Irish Literary Renaissance. Yeats was a major figure in this literary, artistic, and musical movement that celebrated Ireland’s unique cultural heritage. Because Ireland was under English colonial rule at the time, drawing on Ireland’s history or myths and describing the beauty of the countryside was a political gesture. It showed that Ireland was not inferior to England but had its own rich history and natural wonders. Many of Yeats’s poems draw on Gaelic mythology as well as nature scenes. The location that gives “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” its name was also mentioned in Yeats’s poem "The Danaan Quicken Tree.” There, the main character visits Innisfree to eat berries that grow on an enchanted tree. Berries were considered the food of faeries.
