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In the first stanza of William Butler Yeats's "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," what does the speaker say he will do?

William Butler Yeats’s father read to him as a child. Henry David Thoreau’s Walden Pond was among their favorites. References to this American classic are made in this poem, especially in the first stanza of “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.”


Readers must use their imaginations in this poem because that is what the poet does as he writes about a place he aches to go. Standing in the middle of a bustling, lively place (probably...

William Butler Yeats’s father read to him as a child. Henry David Thoreau’s Walden Pond was among their favorites. References to this American classic are made in this poem, especially in the first stanza of “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.”


Readers must use their imaginations in this poem because that is what the poet does as he writes about a place he aches to go. Standing in the middle of a bustling, lively place (probably Dublin in 1893) seems to drive him all the way to Innisfree.


The speaker desires to be someplace other than where he is. These feelings are not unique to Yeats. As children, we all have special memories of places we thought were the grandest places on earth.


Yeats actually proposes in his mind to go to the isle and build himself a cabin, much like the one Thoreau proposed to erect. The poem's speaker says,



I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree


and a small cabin build there, of clay.



When the speaker completes his cabin made from sticks, he is going to plow a garden with nine rows of some kind of beans. To finish off his paradise, a bee colony will provide him with honey.


This is a man who aches for solitude. He enjoys the idea of listening to nothing but bees. He yearns for Innisfree, where he can be himself and rest unperturbed "and live alone in the bee-loud glade.”

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