The article “How to Read a Poem” says that a reader must “complete” what the poem has begun. This could mean that the reader has to find the meaning of a poem through certain reading strategies. Reading the poem aloud multiple times helped me get a better understanding of it.
The poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”, by William Butler Yeats, discusses how the speaker longs to build a life on Innisfree, where he would be able to find peace in nature. Innisfree can symbolize the ideal image of nature and offers a deep spiritual fulfillment that an urban city can’t. Innisfree offers the speaker an escape from reality, like a daydream. The poem states“And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow”. What Yeats mean when peace comes like a “slow drop” is that achieving a peaceful life is a long and slow but calming process that requires patience. However, the urban life is preventing the speaker from creating a peaceful life. The poem states. “While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey I hear it in the deep heart’s core”, the “roadway” and “pavements” symbolize the boredom that comes with urban life. The gray color of the pavement shows how dull the city can be. The speaker demonstrates how the ugliness of urban life is unlike the beauty of nature by how he describes them.
2 thoughts on “Jhon Lopez Discussion 12”
Hi Jhon, your interpretation of “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” aligns with mine. I also thought that Innisfree represented a daydream, to which the narrator emphasized the grey pavement to contrast the beauty of Innisfree. It is an interesting thought that the author wants to escape from reality, and the ugliness of urban life; I had thought more along the lines of just how tired the narrator was of the plain, lifeless city, but I guess that matches up as well. It’s like reading a different side of the same coin.
I agree with your analysis on this poem of him wanting to find peace in nature. He is sick of the city life and wants to have a calm and fulfilling life in nature where he cannot be disturbed by any nonsense from the city or its loud sounds. He wants to see the beauty of nature instead of the hard pavements of the city and when he is in the city all he can envision himself doing is being away from it.