Summary
The speaker of the poem dreams of going to Innisfree, an island in Sligo County of western Ireland. In the first quatrain (a stanza of four lines) he declares his intention to settle on the island and live off the land. He wants to build a cabin, plant beans, and tend to bees. In the second quatrain, he says that living in Innisfree will bring him peace. It is a calm island with bright, vibrant colors. In the daytime, the lake is foggy and during the day the purple heather plants reflect in the water. He can hear the sounds of insects like crickets and the flapping of the linnet bird’s wings. In the third and final quatrain, the speaker again declares that he will go to Innisfree. He reveals here that he is actually in a large city, where there are highways and sidewalks. However, even from there, he can “hear water lapping with low sounds by the shore.” He longs for the Irish countryside so intensely that even amid the loud sounds of the city he can hear Innisfree “in the deep heart’s core.”
Analysis
The poem is full of longing for the countryside of Ireland. The speaker imagines that all of his physical and spiritual needs can be met there. The poem is written with distance from nature, as the speaker is currently in a large, urban space. In this way, scholar Nicholas Allen writes that the poem “can be read as a poem of nostalgia, of melancholy and of utopia." It imagines the landscape of Ireland as a place of healing and peace. In the first stanza, the speaker describes how Innisfree will tend to his physical needs. The second stanza shows how the island will satisfy him spiritually. In the third and final stanza, the speaker contrasts the wealth and peacefulness of the countryside to the “grey” coldness of the city. Even while far away from Innisfree, it continues to live in his “deep heart’s core.” It is part of him.
The first stanza begins with the famous line “I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree.” One important thing to note about this line is that the speaker is not actually going to Innisfree but rather stating his intention to go. That he repeats part of this line at the beginning of the third stanza shows that he may not actually go there at all. Instead, the poem is about his imagination of what will happen if he does. The phrase “I will arise and go” is an allusion from the King James Version of the Bible, with which Yeats and every literate person from his generation would have been familiar. The most famous use of this line is from the Parable of the Prodigal Son in the Book of Luke (15:18). The Prodigal Son is a young man who has squandered his inheritance from his father and ends up as an indentured servant in a foreign land. He eventually asks for his father’s forgiveness, offering to work in his father’s home as long as he can return: “I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, And am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants.” The allusion to this line from the New Testament may describe the situation of people like Yeats who left Ireland to work or live in foreign lands, from England to America. Using this line suggests that these migrants are living difficult lives and dream of returning to the beauty of the Irish countryside. Even if they have to live simply, they will no longer take what Ireland offers for granted.
Another important aspect of the first line is its rhythm. It has six stressed syllables, making the line an example of hexameter. Like the rest of the poem, this line mostly consists of iambs (an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable). However, it contains a pause (caesura) in the middle of the line with two unstressed syllables. If we show the stressed syllables in capital letters, this is how the rhythm of the line works: “I WILL | aRISE | and GO now || and GO | to IN- | nisFREE.” This extra unaccented syllable, the caesura in the middle of the line, has a powerful rhythmic effect. According to scholar Michael North, "The rhythm of each line contains a sigh, a lapse in the scansion, at which point the poet breathes pure longing." Yeats himself stated that he “read [his] poems with great emphasis upon their rhythm.” The caesura gives the words before it an extra emphasis, and so in the first line, the emphasis is on the word “go,” which is repeated twice to show just how desperate the speaker is to leave for Innisfree. The pause and repetition might also show just how hard it is for him to actually go, as if there is something holding him back. It should also be noted that the final line of each quatrain is not in hexameter (six stresses) but tetrameter (four stresses). These shorter lines give each stanza a feeling of finality and mimic the rhythm of a ballad or song. In addition, even this rhythm is sometimes inconsistent. For example, in the final of the first stanza, there are three stressed syllables side-by-side: “BEE-LOUD GLADE.” This gives even more emphasis to the words and forces the reader to pause before moving on.
The content of the first stanza is quite simple. The speaker wishes to go to Innisfree, build a cabin, plant food, and tend to honeybees. He emphasizes the use of simple, natural materials to survive on the island, such as clay and wattles (twigs and branches). His food sources will also be humble. He plans to plant nine rows of beans and engage in beekeeping. This emphasis on solitude shows the influence of Henry David Thoreau, whom Yeats read as a child. In his famous book Walden, Thoreau describes living alone in the woods outside of Concord, Massachusetts in harmony with the natural world. There is even a chapter in Walden entitled “The Bean-Field.” Thoreau was part of the transcendentalist movement, a current of thought that reacted against industrialization and sought salvation in a simpler life in tune with nature. Like Thoreau, the speaker in Yeat’s poem dreams of building a cabin and living alone in harmony with the landscape. This solitude is emphasized by the auditory image of the “bee-loud glade.” The “glade” (or meadow) is so quiet the sound of the buzzing bees is deafening.
The second stanza is less focused on practical concerns of survival than the speaker’s spiritual needs. He dreams that he will find “peace” in Innisfree because it is a place where it occurs naturally. Describing the foggy mornings, he notes the way “peace comes dropping slow, / Dropping from the veils of the morning.” The use of the word “veil” emphasizes the spiritual aspect of this poem, as it is a kind head covering used in religious contexts. This stanza also uses strong imagery related to color. Midnight is described as “all a glimmer,” presumably because the stars are so clear and bright. In contrast, noon is a “purple glow” because the heather plants are reflected in the lake. In this way, nighttime is bright and noon is purple. This creates an otherworldly feeling, just as Innisfree is described as a supernatural place with faeries in some of Yeats’s other work. Besides colorful imagery, there is also more auditory imagery here, with the mention of “crickets sing” and the beating of the “linnet’s wings.” This slant rhyme, in which the words in each of the two-word phrases are loosely rhymed, draws special attention to the parallel between these two sounds.
The final stanza shows the escapism behind the poem’s dream of Innisfree. The opposite of this pastoral utopia is the harshness of the modern city. The speaker describes himself as “stand[ing] on the roadway, or on the pavements grey.” Throughout the poem, Innisfree is described as “there.” In this way, his actual location is not Innisfree but the city. The grayness of the metropolis contrasts with the vivid “purple” and “glimmer[ing]” colors of Innisfree. Similarly, the implied sounds of traffic on the highways and sidewalks contrast with the peaceful sounds of bees, crickets, and linnets. Despite the speaker’s distance from Innisfree, he says that “always night and day” he is able to “hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore.” Even when he is distant from the Irish countryside, he carries it within him. Using a phrase common to English writers from Shakespeare to Percy Shelley, the sounds of Innisfree exist “in the deep heart’s core.” Since the word “heart” already means “core,” the speaker suggests that Innisfree lives in the very heart of his heart.
This description of nature’s purity in contrast to the tainted quality of urban life overlaps with transcendentalist thinkers like Thoreau as well as Romantic poets like William Blake, who described the modern city of London as a kind of nightmare or dystopia in which people are alienated from themselves and each other. In addition, the description of Innisfree in distant western Ireland as the speaker’s ideal pastoral utopia has an important political meaning. When this poem was written in the nineteenth century, Ireland was still under British colonial rule. The Irish people and the western countryside in particular were considered backward and primitive. As an important figure in the Irish Literary Renaissance, Yeats sought to show that rural Ireland was a place of natural wonders, beauty, and peace. Even if the speaker has to leave the countryside, perhaps for foreign lands, he carries it with him in his heart. In this way, the poem praises Irish identity and asks Irish people to be proud of their land.
