Speaker in Poem

Last Saturday, we had a makeup class for Introduction to Literature course, where I got a poem entitled “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”
by William Butler Yeats

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin built there, of clay and wattles made;

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud-glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes

dropping slow

Dropping from the veils of the morning to the cricket sings;

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and a noon a purple glow,

An evening full of the linner’s wings

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear the lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on pavements gray,

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

That day we also learned that the speaker in a poem is not the writer. So when you are asked the question “who is the speaker in ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’?” You must not answer "William Butler Yeats"

You should answer “someone” or “I”.

Just take a look at another example that proves “writer is not speaker in poem”

This following poem is written on a tombstone of an infant in Burial Hills Cemetery, Massachusetts.

Since I have been so quickly done for,

I wonder what I was begun for.

The speaker in that poem is clearly not the writer. It is the dead infant who is, in writer imagination, say those words.

*source: the lecture of Ms.DW in Introduction of Literature course.

#IMINTHEMOODOFREADINGPOEMLATELY

Posted in: Lesson