By W. B. Yeats
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
Originally published in The Rose (1893) by W. B. Yeats. Public domain.
Analysis
Composed in the 1890s, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” distills Yeats’s longing for quiet, self-sufficiency, and spiritual renewal. The imagined island home — “a small cabin” with bean-rows and a hive — embodies a pastoral ideal that answers the pressure of urban modernity.
Sound carries the poem: the soft lapping of water, the cricket’s song, the gentle hush of evening. Even when the speaker stands on city pavement, the remembered sound of the lake resounds in his “deep heart’s core.”
Yeats fuses Celtic reverie with precise sensory detail to reveal how inner peace can be summoned through memory and imagination.