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