<Table> <Tr> <Td> </Td> <Td> Wikisource has original text related to this article: Lake Isle of Innisfree </Td> </Tr> </Table> <Tr> <Td> </Td> <Td> Wikisource has original text related to this article: Lake Isle of Innisfree </Td> </Tr> <P> 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. ^ ≥ </P> <P> The twelve - line poem is divided into three quatrains and is an example of Yeats's earlier lyric poems . Throughout the three short quatrains the poem explores the speaker's longing for the peace and tranquility of Innisfree while residing in an urban setting . The speaker in this poem yearns to return to the island of Innisfree because of the peace and quiet it affords . He can escape the noise of the city and be lulled by the "lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore ." On this small island, he can return to nature by growing beans and having bee hives, by enjoying the "purple glow" of noon, the sounds of birds' wings, and, of course, the bees . He can even build a cabin and stay on the island much as Thoreau, the American Transcendentalist, who lived in this manner on Walden Pond . During Yeats's lifetime it was--to his annoyance--one of his most popular poems and on one occasion was recited (or sung) in his honor by two (or ten--accounts vary) thousand boy scouts . The first quatrain speaks to the needs of the body (food & shelter); the second to the needs of the spirit (peace); the final quatrain is the meeting of the inner life (memory) with the physical world (pavement grey). </P>

Where is the lake isle of innisfree located