As Edward Hirsch so aptly put it in his article “How to Read a Poem”, when approaching an unfamiliar poem, readers tend to make three false assumptions and the one I made was to think that the whole poem was a kind of code where every detail corresponds to a single thing and if I wanted to understand it I had to decipher it. I made this mistake when reading the poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” written by William Butler Yeats in which the author just expresses his desire to find calm and peace by going to live alone on an island <<And I shall have some peace there, for peace slowly descends>>. For me this poem was hiding an unknown meaning and I started looking for it until I applied the literary techniques explained in Edward Hirsch’s article and then I realized my mistake.
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