The Lake Isle of Innisfree: W.B. Yeats

-W.B yeats

This morning on the drive to work the radio djs were discusing ways to extend your summer vacation. They offered suggestions such as uploading vacation pictures on your work computer, sending e-mails to family and friends retelling vacation memories, and continuing to order frozen delights instead of your typical draft beers at happy or the bar.

I think all of these suggestions would just make me depressed that I was no longer at the beach and losing my tan. My suggestion, had I called it in to the radio station, is to grasp the meaning of W.B. Yeats, The Lake Isle of Innisfree, and remember to feel your vacation “in the deep heart’s core” every day.

The truth and beauty of the poem resides in its sound scheme, a hexameter rhyme pattern which echoes the lapping pulse of a tide. Innisfree, which could mean Inner freedom, in is free or in freedom, is the place of solitude for Yeats, whether it be a literal place or a metaphorical representation of his place of peace. Yeats, within is solitude, is able to recapture the Lake Isle of Innisfree even when he is “standing on the roadway” or “on the pavements gray” indicators of an everyday routine or a place very different from Innisfree.

Yeats expresses this mental escape which he is able to “arise and go now” within his memory and be taken back to the peace and quiet of Lake Innisfree because “night and day” he is able to hear the water lapping sounds of Innisfree within “his deep heart’s core.”

Innisfree, is a metaphorical transition to an internal place of peace, and represents something different for everyone. My Innisfree ismainly, poetry and literature, because it transcends me to the thoughts of peace and understanding and truth which I don’t always reflect upon in my day to day routine. Within one’s deep heart’s core there is a truth and beauty which sometimes may contradict our daily routine. The ideal Yeats presents in Innisfree is a mental peace and solitude, where the individual is able to bring Innisfree to reality “night and day” and attribute the truth felt in “our deep heart’s core” to our lives.

-cvirginia

~ by cvirginia on July 23, 2008.