There are many things to like about a poem, the sound of its lyrics among them. A poem’s music affects us whether or not we are conscious of it. This enjoyment of a poem’s music cannot be taught; it must be learned, by saying a poem out loud, and perhaps reading it more than once. By voicing it repeatedly, we feel its weights and measures, we notice where each syllable rises or comes to rest, we taste the consonant’s motion through lips and tongue. Fortunately, there is a large body of poems written in the metre of songs, with words and prosody that delights the ears and makes a poem memorable. “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) is a good example. This 12-line lyrical poem was written by Yeats in 1888 while he was in London, and homesick for Ireland. Yeats’s chose Innisfree, an uninhabited island off the coast of County Donegal in northern Ireland as the subject of his poem because it was near where he spent his summers as a child.

Here is “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”. I encourage you to read it slowly and more than once, letting the beauty of word and sound capture your imagination of what it’s like be in a place like Innisfree. At end, there’s a video of the poem, read in the soothing voice of Sir Anthony Hopkins.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

“The Lake Isle of Innisfree” read by Sir Anthony Hopkins.