Key Facts

• Full Title: The Lake Isle of Innisfree
• Author: William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
• Title of the Author: The Last Romantic Poet & Irish National Poet
• Prize: Nobel Prize (1923)
• Source: Inspired by Yeats’s childhood visits to County Sligo and the natural beauty of Lough Gill and Innisfree Island
• Written Time: 1888 (in London, during a moment of homesickness)
• First Published: 1890 (in The National Observer), later included in The Rose (1893)
• Publisher: The National Observer (initial publication); later, collected by Macmillan in The Rose
• Genre: Lyrical Poem
• Form: Twelve-line lyric divided into three quatrains (4-line stanzas)
• Rhyme Scheme: ABAB CDCD EFEF
• Tone: Dreamy, Meditative, Reflective, Tranquil
• Point of View: First-Person (the speaker is Yeats himself or a poetic persona)
• Climax: The speaker contrasts the noisy urban life with the peaceful dream of Innisfree
• Significance: A symbol of inner peace, spiritual retreat, and the poet’s yearning for harmony with nature; a bridge between Romanticism and early Modernism
• Setting:

• Time Setting: Timeless; reflects an eternal hope
• Place Setting: Innisfree — a small uninhabited island in Lough Gill, County Sligo, Ireland