William Bell ( Leonard Nimoy) narrates the first stanza of the poem, alluding to his plans of collapsing the two universes into a new world where he plays God.
OLA GJEILO THE LAKE ISLE SERIES
Evans (published by Seacastle Music Company, 1995).
He can escape the noise of the city and be lulled by the "lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore." On this small island, he can return to nature by growing beans and having bee hives, by enjoying the "purple glow" of heather at noon, the sounds of birds' wings, and, of course, the bees. The poem expresses the speaker's longing for the peace and tranquility of Innisfree while residing in an urban setting. The twelve-line poem is divided into three quatrains and is an example of Yeats's earlier lyric poems. 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." Analysis 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. From the sudden remembrance came my poem "Innisfree," my first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music. He writes, "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. Yeats describes the inspiration for the poem coming from a "sudden" memory of his childhood while walking down Fleet Street in London in 1888. Innisfree is an uninhabited island within Lough Gill, in Ireland, near which Yeats spent his summers as a child.