"The Lake Isle of Innisfree" - W.B. Yeats

Aug 12, 2007 01:28



I love the "bee-loud glade": Innisfree is so quiet the bees are loud.  Two words to invert quiet and loudness, setting Innisfree as far from clamor as Eden.

First I loved the first stanza all out of proportion, but I've rounded out.  The middle is a love song to Innisfree with beautiful swooping down-up curves of sound, like swallows wheeling over the lake.  "Peace comes dropping slow, dropping from the veils of the morning to [up!] where the cricket sings," again inverted where morning is the downnote and cricket-song night is the upnote.  The last stanza beats softly like wavelets, heartbeats, remembrance of footsteps, the constant wish and promise that I will go to Innisfree.  Each phrase ends slow and long in the final stanza; the distance breaks my heart.



It's always a wish and promise.  Innisfree is not a place you can really go.  I carry a vision of a hut in the desert, where the land is a thousand shades of gray and green and gold and rust, and the sky is vast. 

places, favorite poems, poetry

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