The Lake Isle of Innisfree

1. The Lake Isle of Innisfree By William Butler Yeats

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. I will arise and go now, for always night and day I 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.

5. How to set about reading a poem? • To begin with, read the poem once straight through, with no particular expectations; read open-mindedly. • Let yourself experience whatever you find, without worrying about the large general and important ideas the poem contains (if indeed it contains any).

6. On the second reading, read for the exact sense of all the words; if there are difficult words, look them up in a dictionary. Dwell on any difficult parts as long as you need to.

7. Vocabulary study • isle: island • wattles: poles interwoven with sticks or branches, formerly used in building as frameworks to support walls or roofs • glade: an open space in woods树篱 • cricket: a small brown jumping insect that makes a shrill sound by rubbing its front wings together 蟋蟀 • glimmer: weak faint unsteady light微光

8. linnet: a creature with wings---a songbird of finch family 红雀

9. Use context clues to derive the meaning of other words. • I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, • Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,

10. I 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.

11. Grammar study • Nine bean rows will I have there, • → I will have nine bean rows there. • And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made; • → And build a small cabin made of clay and wattles there.

12. While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, • →While I stand on the roadway, or on the grey pavements. (It rhymes with day and makes extra emphasis that the city is dull and depressing.)

13. Hear the words • If you read the poem silently to yourself, sound its words in your mind. Better still, read the poem aloud, or hear someone else read it. You may discover meanings you didn’t perceive in it before.

14. Paraphrase the poem • Try to paraphrase the poem as a whole, or perhaps just the more difficult lines. In paraphrasing, we put into our own words what we understand the poem to say, restating ideas that seem essential, coming out and stating what the poem may only suggest.

15. paraphrase I wish I could go to Innisfree now. Innisfree is my dreamland. If I go there, I’d like to build a small cabin, grow some beans and have a hive for bees. There I could enjoy peace by myself and admire the various scenes from morning till night. In the morning, I could see the daybreak; at night, I could hear the crickets singing; at midnight, I could watch the star twinkling in the sky. At noon, I could feel the sun shining brightly, and in the evening, I could watch a great number of linnets flying to nest.

16. How I wish I could go to Innisfree right now. I think of it every day and night. Sometimes, when I stand on the roadway, or on the grey pavement, I can hear the lake water lapping softly by the shore in the depth of my heart.

17. Making a paraphrase can help you see the central thought of the poem, its theme. • Themes can be stated variously, depending on what you believe most matters in the poem.

18. Theme 1: I yearn for an ideal place where I can find perfect peace and happiness. • Theme 2: This city is getting me down---I want to go back to nature. • Theme 3: I want to quit the city for my heaven on earth. • Theme 4: I am longing to go back to my hometown.

19. Establish a personal connection with the poem by asking the following questions: • Is there any place you are longing to go? • What do you yearn for in life? Freedom? Peace? Love? Friendship? Knowledge? Successful career? Family? • How do you like the city life? How does the country life appeal to you? Are you homesick?

20. A close study of poetic devices • Form: it is a lyrical（抒情的） poem written mostly in hexameter(六音步）, with six stresses in each line, in a loosely iambic（抑扬） pattern. The last line of each four-line stanza shortens the line to tetrameter（四音步）, with only four stresses. Each of the three stanzas has the same ABAB rhyme scheme.

21. Image • Visual Images: lake, a small cabin, nine bean rows, a hive, the various scenes from morning till night: glimmer, glow • Sound Images: bee, cricket, linnet, water lapping.

22. Metaphor and Personification • Metaphor: the veils of morning • Personification: peace comes dropping slow, where the cricket sings

23. Alliteration(头韵） • gg: go now, and go to Innisfree; glimmer, glow; • cc: cabin, clay; • hh: have, hive, honey • ll: live, alone, loud, glade; lake, lapping, low • sccs: some, peace, peace, slow

24. End rhyme and internal rhyme End rhyme（尾韵）: Innisfree, bee; made, glade slow, glow; sings, wings day, gray; shore, , core Internal rhyme(行内韵）: Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

25. Assonance（半谐音） • I will arise and go now, for always night and day • While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,

26. Background Information • Yeats commented on “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” in a passage in his autobiography about his London days: • I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop-window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem "Innisfree," my first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music.

27. I had begun to loosen rhythm as an escape from rhetoric and from that emotion of the crowd that rhetoric brings, but I only understood vaguely and occasionally that I must for my special purpose use nothing but the common syntax. A couple of years later I could not have written that first line with its conventional archaism -- "Arise and go" -- nor the inversion of the last stanza.

28. About William Butler Yeats(1865-1939) • Poet and playwright, an Irishman of English ancestry, Yeats was born in Dublin, Ireland, the son of a painter, John Butler Yeats. • He spent his childhood in County Sligo, where his parents were raised, and in London. One of his earlier poems written in 1892, The Lake Isle of Innisfree, was out of his homesickness for this region where he spent many summers as a boy.

29. Early in life Yeats sought to transform Irish folklore and legend into poems. • He overcame shyness to take an active part in social events: he became involved in the movement for an Irish nation and in founding the Irish Literary Theatre(1898) and the Abby Theatre in Dublin.

30. Also a potent influence on his poetry was the Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne, whom he met in 1889, a woman equally famous for her passionate nationalist politics and her beauty. Though she married another man in 1903 and grew apart from Yeats (and Yeats himself was eventually married to another woman, Georgie Hyde Lees), she remained a powerful figure in his poetry.

31. Yeats was deeply involved in politics in Ireland, and in the twenties, despite Irish independence from England, his verse reflected a pessimism about the political situation in his country and the rest of Europe.

32. Appointed a senator of the Irish Free State in 1922, he is remembered as an important cultural leader, as a major playwright and as one of the very greatest poets—in any language—of the century. Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1923 and died in 1939 at the age of 73. (from Poets.org)

33. Four steps in reading poems • 1. Enjoy the sound • 2. Savor the word • 3.Visualize the image • 4.Observe the form • 5. reflect on the theme

34. Reading Aloud and reciting • I will arise and go now, and go to , • And there, of made; • will I have there, a for the , • And live alone in the .

35. And I shall_____________________, for peace______________________, • Dropping from to _____; • There midnight’s all , and noon a , • And evening full of .

36. I will_________________, for always_____________, • I hear ________; • While______________, or_________________________, • I hear it_______________________.