ENGL 495 Lecture Notes - Lecture 13: A Cradle Song, Walter Pater, Iambic Tetrameter
4 Jun 2018
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10 January, 2018
Consider Yeats as a visual artist; Yeats’ father and brother were painters, his two sisters ran a
small family printing press Cuala Press after breaking out of the crafting business
- Yeats was the odd man out, and he often considered poems as visual objects
- He also often published poems with Cuala Press
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
- Simple rhyme scheme, sort of hexameter; visual, in terms of seeing the rhymes and the
lengths of the lines
- Temporally oriented towards the future (will, shall), physically oriented towards
something else → what is he running away from, and why with such urgency?
- Roadway and pavements grey contrast the lake isle; with no movement, he does not
make it to Innisfree
- Pavement = urban
- Nature sounds contrast the sounds of the deep heart’s core, shutting out the
pavement sound
- Standing = immobile
- Wattles are woven sticks, tying into the idea of poetry as a loom, text as a textile; the first
stanza had emphasis on building and creating, creating the ideal environment in which
to write poetry, and the hexameter feels too slow
- BUT he doesn’t get there -- the poem is about the expression of volition, not the
fulfillment of volition
- There is an idea of perfection without doing the work, though at the same time,
the poem is the work, and he still doesn’t get there
- Hexameter is used for epics (Homer); there’s a connection between ancient Greece and
Ireland, both at the root of European civilisation and identity
- There is a tension in the poem between constraint and freedom
- Ex: some hexameter lines have extra syllables, the rhyme scheme can be
constraining, though the speaker is searching for freedom
- Lake is a geographical containment
- The fourth lines of each stanza are shorter, stopping before completion
- 3 lines end with caesura, 4th lines end with periods.
- 4th lines are all about hearing, silence is necessary in order to listen
- Innisfree is in western Ireland, where Yeats spent much of his childhood, a return to
idealised childhood settings
- The poem is dependent on sound; Yeats often wrote poetry based on sound, as he was
a notoriously bad speller
- Pay attention to the inner and outer acoustics
- Temporality in the 2nd stanza
- Out of chronology, even though there are still parallels points to the poem’s
atemporal tone
- Times are mismatched with their descriptions (ie, crickets in the morning)
- Everything is collapsed into one continuous time
Document Summary
Consider yeats as a visual artist; yeats" father and brother were painters, his two sisters ran a small family printing press cuala press after breaking out of the crafting business. Yeats was the odd man out, and he often considered poems as visual objects. He also often published poems with cuala press. Simple rhyme scheme, sort of hexameter; visual, in terms of seeing the rhymes and the lengths of the lines. Roadway and pavements grey contrast the lake isle; with no movement, he does not make it to innisfree. Nature sounds contrast the sounds of the deep heart"s core, shutting out the pavement sound. But he doesn"t get there -- the poem is about the expression of volition, not the fulfillment of volition. There is an idea of perfection without doing the work, though at the same time, the poem is the work, and he still doesn"t get there.
