The Lake Isle of Innisfree

“The Lake Isle of Innisfree” is a 12-line lyric poem, divided into three stanzas. The first three lines of each stanza are written in iambic hexameter (six metrical feet per line), while the last line of each stanza is written in iambic tetrameter (three metrical feet per line). This emphasizes the last line and somewhat mitigates the rhyme scheme ABAB CDCD EFEF. Yeats, by his own admission, deliberately emphasized poetic language to make it not sound like prose (See: Further Reading & Resources). Yeats purposely gives the poem a mythic feel with use of pauses, and the long vowel sounds add dramatic effect and help to capture an Irish accent. For example, “I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree” has a substantial cadence. This phrasing was old-fashioned, even for the time it was written, but serves its purpose in connecting the speaker to his ancestral roots. Emotionally, the poem relies on a driving “will” (Line 1) to “go to Innisfree” (Line 1) and take comfort in the nature of the island. The poem’s turn (rhetorical shift or change in thought/emotion) is the revelation that the speaker is in the city—far from Innisfree. The island only exists as part of the speaker’s imaginative life in the present moment. This helps enhance the tone of longing for beauty and yearning for peacefulness.

The word “caesura” means “to cut” in Latin, but in poetry it signifies a pause in the middle of a line. It is often used to provide a break for the reader to take in multiple pieces of information, particularly in longer lines. Yeats uses caesuras, indicated by commas, in most of the lines in “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” This emphasizes different parts of the speaker’s meaning in what comes before the comma and what comes after, while still retaining a complete or connected thought. For example, Yeats writes, “I will arise and go now, || and go to Innisfree” (Line 1). Here, we see that it’s not just that they will go, but particularly to Innisfree, an island near their childhood home that is not near where they are currently. The caesura divides the desire to leave the city location with the answering destination. This is done again in the next stanza: “And I shall have some peace there, || for peace comes dropping slow” (Line 5). Here, the need for peace is shown separated from the speed at which it arrives. The most important caesuras occur in the first line of the third stanza, “I will arise and go now, || for always || night and day” (Line 9). Here, the caesuras emphasize that the images of Innisfree linger “always” (Line 9) and “night and day” (Line 9). This highlights the fact that the desire to retreat from the city is paramount and ever-present. Further, it sets up a return to the beginning of the poem by using similar phrasing.