In his poem The Lake Isle of Innisfree, William Butler Yeats develops a curiously mournful ode that captures an idyllic space of respite and peace yet imbues this space with a sense of tragic elusiveness whose primary value is vested in its myth rather than its promise. He begins the poem with a declaration to “arise and go now,” immediately, from his current location and moreover repeats the phrase “and go” in the same line, establishing a tension -born tone of urgency and resolve that is moreover augmented by the almost religious sense of divine obligation connoted with the word “arise.” Thus it seems Yeats intends to draw for himself a cloister that, though sanctifying and fortifying, is nevertheless lamented for its necessity in the face of the imposing roadways and gray pavements of the reality he seeks to go from.
The intentions introduced by this loaded first line are expounded upon with the following verses describing the developing ideal of Innisfree, “I will… a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;/ Nine bean rows will I have there…” The inversions in these lines produce a dreamy effect that clearly contrasts his ideal of Innisfree with the reality that he desires to arise and go from. The following verse– the last line of the first stanza– which reads, “And live alone in the bee-loud glade” jolts the reader with an unexpectedly terse sort of rhythm that abruptly punctuates the fluid, fanciful lyricism of the preceding lines and subtly yet effectively reminds the reader that Innisfree is indeed only a dream that cannot be dwelt upon too extravagantly.
In the next stanza, however, Yeats, relentless for the redemption he sees in Innisfree, resumes his decadent dream and further romanticizes it for himself, repeating the word “peace” in the same way and in the same syntactic place that he earlier repeated the word “go.” But this optimism, too, is curtailed with another rhythmically blunt line at the end of the stanza that Yeats uses as a kind of reproach and as a transition into the tragically resigned tone of the next and final stanza.
This contrast of rhythm considered together with the jolting development of Yeats’s dreamscape which is punctuated by a gloomy industrial scene establishes not only the central structure but also the central argument of the poem: the industrial urban world does not allow for daydreaming. Yet, I think that in the very aspect of the poem, which is a declaration of delightful longing– a daydream– Yeats redeems his gray reality of roadways and pavement. In the last line, which is another rhythmically abrupt line (“I hear it in the deep heart’s core”) Yeats implies this time not self-reproach for dreaming of the unattainable but affirmation and sanctification for the ability to do so.
You do an excellent job of articulating that core tension in the poem, which resides in the urgency repeated throughout–which you aptly call an almost religious call to arise–alongside the tragically illusive dreamscape. The poem itself creates that fortifying and sanctifying space, and yet admits the tension you discern in the lines that seem, if not to roughly jolt us out of alignment, at least to gently tug us from the stupor of the beautifully modulated leading lines of each stanza. Those final lines are still soft to me, but they are also short and rhythmically distinct.
The argument that Yeats affirms his urban setting rather than escapes it here is quite interesting. Perhaps it is the sense of contrast that allows him to idealize Innisfree in this way. I also like the ways in which the very rhythms of this poem are themselves an imaginative recreation of his idyllic escape. The poem becomes our Innisfree, our imaginative escape, however brief, from the world pressing in around us. For the early Yeats especially, poetry served–in its rhythms and sounds–to elongate and extend this ideal moment of poetic, well, being. It is his own kind of momentary stay, to borrow Robert Frost’s famous line, from confusion.