Escaping to a place where we feel less burdened has been a constant human reaction to stress or unhappiness. Thus, poets, who more often than not characterize their own emotions through their words, have a way of making even the description of this comfort seem magical. The poem, inspired by Thoreau’s Walden, seems to waver between engagement and disengagement. Is the poet trying to go somewhere, or is he trying to get away from everywhere?
Yeats’s lines provide rich rows of sounds to hoe: assonance (from I . . . arise in the first stanza through the o-sounds in the closing stanza), onomatopoeia (lapping), initial alliteration, internal alliteration (arise, Innisfree; hear, heart’s core). Sound images of bees, cricket, linnet, and lake water are predominate. Whatever noises come from roadway or pavement, however, are left unspecified.
If he will go, will it be in the future? And, does he want the noisy solitude of rural life as opposed to a stark urban life?
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