The Lake Isle of Innisfree

W. B. Yeats(1865–1939)

The Rose, 1893

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 dayI 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.

From The Rose (1893), via the English Wikisource transcription.

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About the poem

W. B. Yeats wrote The Lake Isle of Innisfree as a young man and collected it in the The Rose sequence (1893), from his early Celtic-Twilight period. Innisfree is a real, tiny island in Lough Gill, County Sligo, the country of the poet's childhood. The poem is a dream of withdrawal: to build a cabin there of clay and wattles, plant nine bean-rows, keep a hive, and live alone "in the bee-loud glade".

All its force is in the final turn. The first two quatrains paint the idyll — the peace that "comes dropping slow", the purple glow of noon, the linnet's wings — but the third reveals where the dream is dreamed from: "While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey." Yeats wrote it in London, homesick, when a little fountain in a shop window brought back the sound of lake water. The island is not in Ireland: it is "in the deep heart's core".

It is one of the best-loved poems in the English language, and already sets the music that would win Yeats the Nobel Prize in 1923: the Irish cadence, the longing for a place, and the hypnotic pulse of "I will arise and go now" that opens and reopens the poem.