is lake isle of innisfree a real place
The Isle of Innisfree is an uninhabited island within Lough Gill, in County Sligo, Ireland, where Yeats spent his summers as a child. Yeats describes the inspiration for the poem coming from a ``sudden'' memory of his childhood while walking down Fleet Street in London in 1888. 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. From the sudden remembrance came my poem ``Innisfree,'' my first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music. 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. 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.'' The poem is featured in passports of Irish citizens.^≥
Lake Isle of Innisfree