With reference to 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree', explain how Yeats uses language, structure and poetic technique to convey meaning.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree is one of Yeats’ earliest poems, written while he was living in London. The author later admitted that the Isle of Innisfree was inspired by an island of the same name in County Sligo, the memory of which returned to Yeats as he was strolling through London. The poem may be regarded as an “ars poetica”, meaning that one of its major themes is that of literary creation and art. Moreover, the extensive use of folkloric motifs and images helps create the theme of return to Irish tradition, which is recurrent throughout his works. The poem’s mythological and traditional themes, as well as its eerie yet peaceful atmosphere, undoubtedly make it part of the Romantic orientation, which marked Yeats’ early works. Prosodically speaking, the poem is a stanzaic one, with heterometric lines. Each of the three stanzas is made up of three hypermetric iambic hexameters and one hypermetric iambic tetrameter, with masculine additional beats. However, a Formalist critic would note that the very last line is not hypermetric. This lack of an additional beat in an otherwise highly chiselled rhythmic pattern symbolizes the poet’s inner struggle at being torn away from his roots both physically and culturally. The topos of the last stanza differs from that of the rest of the poem, being set on a bleak London street, away from the lushness that is Irish myth and culture. The rhyme scheme is abab and the poem is strewn with distinguishing feet (pyrrhic feet in otherwise iambic lines) such as “now, and”, “of, the” and “now, for”, which break the cadence and give the poem a more natural and ancestral sonority. However, unity is maintained through the use of caesuras in the first line of every stanza and the repetition of “I will arise and go now” in the opening and final strophes. Additional musicality is created through the employment of internal rhymes such as “While I sat on the roadway, or on the pavement grey”.