How to Analyze a Poem: a close reading of W.B. Yeats' poem "Lake Isle of Innisfree"
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- čas přidán 28. 05. 2024
- Most people are intimidated by poetry because they feel they need to understand a poem intellectually to enjoy it. But poetry is not a primarily intellectual art. It communicates to the entire human being. It addresses us simultaneously as people with intellects, emotions, imaginations, intuition, memory, and physical bodies. It addresses us in the fullness of our humanity. That being said, we can still analyze a poem if we want to. In this video I explain my personal approach on how to analyze poetry using W.B. Yeats' poem "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" as an example.
Teaching poetry can be difficult. This video is part of my series "The Art of Poetry", a video series adapted from a class I used to teach at USC. In this video I explain how to read a poem and how to analyze a poem. I use a W.B. Yeats' poem in this example, but my techniques can be applied to analyzing any poem. I will be slowly filming the full "Art of Poetry" video series and compiling it on CZcams. You can find the series here: • The Art of Poetry
For more videos on poetry you can subscribe to my CZcams channel here: / @danagioia6943
Twitter: @DanaGioiaPoet
I do not own the copyright of the recording of Yeats' reading "Lake Isle of Innisfree".
It was orson welles who had said, a film is not good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet, sir i would like to give you my deepest thanks for opening my eyes in a very new and interesting way, not only my respect for poetry and you have arised but also my filmmaking understanding has deepened, i will get into poetry and pretty soon start writing my own for it seems to be the mother of all art, and will help me tremendously in my filmmaking journey, thank you sir once again and i wish you never stop making these videos!
A highly accomplished close reading. With an understanding of the parable alluded to, this poem is no longer a merely wistful expression of longing for rustic simplicity, but a driving and urgent prayer for a misspent life to be redeemed. We experience the prodigal's squandered inheritance as the severed connection with an Irish heritage (or any spiritual birthright).
That reading by Yeats was chilling. I never heard anyone recite poetry like that.
I agree. Yeats doesn't recite the poem, he chants it. Almost sings it. I wonder if that is how classical poets read their work 2000 years earlier.
@@danagioia6943there's also Robert Frost video recording available
@@danagioia6943 Yeats was heavily influenced by the Dada movement as well as enjoyed the more formal, classical poetry of the past so this is why he chanted his poems.
@@toribukofske3929 Sometimes life really is that theatrical and over the top; they are moments we will remember forever, and others are ones we wish we could forget.
Goosebumps as soon as you began introducing him. This makes history so glorious. Us Irish poets love him, innit 😄
My modern-day parody that I wrote
I will arise and go now
And go to the late-night mall
And pop-tarts I’ll buy there
And a jar of hair gel
Or maybe mousse or fixing spray
As gel dries dripping slow
And worse, it takes away the glow
Of natural, healthy hair
I will arise and go now
For whether night or day
The mall is always open
With products on display
I love the second floor
This Yeats poem is expressing nostalgia for a simple Irish natural retreat
as a distant city dweller.
Wow! I wish I had received this type of education in AP Literature. Thank you!
Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant introduction to poetry and a particular poem. By the way, core is from the same root as "coeur", from the Proto Indo-European -kerd. And, if you think of the lake isle as a core within the lake that is surrounded by land, a heart within a heart, then the core of the heart is also a heart within the heart. The brilliant explication by Dana Giolia has opened this poem to me both intellectually and deeply emotionally. Thank you.
i can feel this video will change my life, thank you very much.
Wonderful to find this. It is also double proof that no matter how gifted, how subtle, how sensitive or how intelligent one is, the art of reciting poetry well is a separate art indeed.
From an aspiring poet, I thank you for this wonderful teaching!
Fantastic lecture Mr. Gioia, thank you so much for sharing and analyzing this beautiful and timeless poem.
This (as someone who is entirely foreign to poetry) was wonderful and illuminating. Thank you
Thank you for this wonderful video. This is excellent material for me to assign my students to watch at home for the British Literature Class I teach.
Thank you very much for that analysis of this major work. I have always connected with the bits about longing for a simple life in the natural world, but not until I watched this, did I ever realize why the poem was so universally appreciated! - I was at the Tor House Poetry Festival the year Jeffers was quite appropriately honored by you and "The Big Read" Festival. Thank You!
though I do adhere to the precept that " a poem should not mean, but be" I must praise Prof Gioia for his lucidity, depth of insight, and non-didactic yet expert style of instruction.
The Lake Isle lives in the poet's imagination and in his heart. There are millions of people today in big cities who long for the same thing the poet does in this poem. I certainly do. The poet equates himself with the prodigal son in the sense that his true self originates in the rural natural places not in a big dirty evil city. He has been led away by vice and selfishness and illusion and now seeks to return in a kind of penance-- seeking peace in the simple life removed from the world's corruption. He arises, gets up and goes , but also rises in a spiritual sense by changing his life.
So enlightning. Thanks from the core of my heart.
This is excellently well done, and is the best answer I've ever heard to the question, 'Why does it matter who wrote Shakespeare's works, as long as we have them?'
If you don't have the background information right, you won't correctly understand the poem (or other literary work). That's why we need to know who the beautiful young man is, who is being compared to a summer's day in Sonnet #18. Why Polonius's verbosity is made fun of, why he is called a fishmonger and why Hamlet dispenses with him by a sword while he is spying on Hamlet and his mother.
Stunning lecture, and I know nothing of poems....I am so inpired to do so by you. Thanks SO much✨
This is a superb example of
the ART of exposition!!!
Thank you Mr. Giola for opening my mind to an art form that eluded me. Because of your passion, I will look at poetry in an entirely different way.
You have paid me (and the art) the highest compliment.
In a poem even if you don’t know the meaning of some word, just invent your own meaning. You will never be wrong. Poem is understood by the reader and not by the poet. Just go and enjoy.
I write poetry and I hope people look up the meanings if they don’t know them.
@@Degjoy people seldom do it.
Funny. Why dont youMake your own poems,,?
not the Lecturer we deserve, The Lecturer we need.......
Thankyou so so much sir, your lectures helped me first time in my life to understand what poetry is and how to read and actually enjoy it. Now I can confidently start my Masters in English Literature.
I'm glad to provide some small help as you further your career in literature.
Such an informative and well presented interpretation. Thank you. Two things that worried me about the poem that weren’t commented on - not a criticism as there simply isn’t time to cover every possibility !
Firstly, why 9 bean rows? Would any other monosyllabic number have done? Taking the view that a poet always uses words carefully I looked up the numerology of 9 and it represents completion. The highest value single digit number associated with experience and wisdom. In Victorian England at this time there was a fad for the occult and Yeats was interested in this area so would have known.
Secondly, ‘ where the crickets sing’. I’m not sure if there are crickets in Ireland, they’re relatively rare in the UK. As someone who speaks a reasonable level of Italian I know of the Italian phrase ‘ where the crickets sing’ as being associated with cemeteries and death.
Also, veils of the morning may hold morning and mourning together. Possibly, Yeats is alluding via a natural description to both the natural daily cycle and the cycle of human life and death which is part of the world of Innisfree and, as such, is registered with a calm acceptance.
9 is the number of the Ancient Greek muses
@jeffhunt2475 I don't know where you now live or where you grew up, but I was born and grew up in the Midwest. There is no dearth of crickets there. Before a record-breaking cold and snowy winter, my home was invaded by crickets that I always picked up and relocated outdoors. As I picked up each one, I kept thinking, 'I hope you're not telling me that we're going to have a really bad winter.' That was exactly what came to pass.
Your lecture was a masterpiece!
Perhaps it's not right to over analyse poetry either , for meanings that just don't exist. That's only overthinking what should primarily be an emotional experience . Nine bean rows is possibly an alliterative effect ? While the crickets are just rural crickets , making a noise in the evening.
Thank you for the insightful lecture. Yeat's reading reminded me for some reason of Jefferson Airplane's song "White Rabbit". It has similar musical energy and trance-like quality. Also, you mentioned the way the poem is graphically organized, with the shorter line at the end of every stanza. It might look like the soft waves of the lake, which is the sound that the speaker so longs for
Fantastic, wonderous walk through! Beautifully paced, wonderfully inspiring of reflection. Thanks.😊
I'm so glad to see you posting these! A gift for many.
Oh, I am totally absorbed by the analysis of thus masterpiece. This is the first video which brought me to Mr. Dana Gioia. Now I am the fan of his chamnel. His musical voice also brought me to a greater hight. Thanks Gioia, please keep on up loading such as many as you can.
Would you please recite more famous poems along with your own.
Wow. The analysis at the ending is a twist greater than the ending of "The Sixth Sense". Thank you.
This is just beautiful and did in fact untie Yeats's poem for me. Thank you so much.
Phenomenal series of videos!
Thank you for a liberating lecture. It was like you were distilling a fine tasting wine. To me an accessible lecturer knows how to make the topic less confusing to those who want to learn how to do the same. I'll be looking out for more of your fine wines/lectures in future.
Plllll”, hi 30:43
Thank you so much for such analysis of this poem Sir !
From Bangladesh 🇧🇩
Thank you for this great video Mr. Gioia
Thank you master, in my town we try and try to understand poetry in some way (almost any way), and it´s quite a mess when we start to read and say some "poems", we don´t get any light sometimes. Your speech tend to enlighten our doubts, Thank you very much
I thank you for this analysis of Yeats's poem--but I can never appreciate him, because after he had become "an institution," he said of Wilfred Owen's poetry that it was “unworthy of the Poets Corner of a country newspaper.” Owen was the greatest poet to emerge from the First World War, and his poems touch me in a way that Yeats's never have.
Seeking the quiet and peace of being close to nature and being settled in one's self, in one's flow of thoughts, in the play of sounds of surrounds I feel my feelings and being closer to my God.
For me good poetry is never prescriptive; it suggests, points in many directions, which makes it dense with possibilities of different lives, different worlds, firing the imagination.
Very good, excellent !!Thank you so much for this beautiful lesson in WB Yeats poem 🙏
So grateful for this. Thank you prof.
Enlightening! Tks
Thank you so very much. My comprehension of this, my all time favourite poem is, thanks to you , at a new height. It truly represents the yearning of my heart's inner core!
Thank you, Sir, for a wonderful exposition.
We had to learn this poem at school some 62 years ago. However, the meaning of the verse was never explained to us.
I have always loved the poem and your analysis of it has given it a whole new life for me.
I learned to love poetry by hearing by Mexican-American mother recite the poems she had learned in elementary school. They meant a great deal to her. And they eventually changed my life.
I never got Yeats’s poetry. I still don’t. I’m quite fond of Heaney’s prose but have had issues with his verse. I remember studying this poem, and I struggled. While I still don’t think I got it, I did like Dana’s explanation. I remember my years as an undergraduate English major , I don’t remember such a patient approach. This was a very pleasant revisiting of why I studied literature
Patience describes Dana's approach to literature. How, just nice, it is when a somewhat daunting subject can be made more accessible and I dare to say, more simple. Dana, your restrained joy is infectious. So that if one loves literature, but for whatever reason, has strayed. Your lecture would revived a waining faithfulness. Just Wonderful!
Wonderful, very enlightening. More please Mr Gioia.
excellent beginning. I'll watch the rest!
this is one of my favorite poems--if you like it, listen to Judy Collins's version of it as a song. Yeats's poem bears a bit a resemblance to Blake's London.
Yeats ❤️
This was a beautiful unraveling. Thank you!!
Beautiful explanation sir!💞
Thanks for this , it was interesting and made me think more about a poem I have loved for many years. I was familiar with the parable of the prodigal son but had never before recognised the reference to it in the poem. It made a lot of sense.
Another reference I’ve always felt Yeats was making with the beauty and peace of the lake isle was to a higher state of consciousness, a more authentic state of inner being. The “rising” of the soul to divine realms where peace and beauty are intrinsic to being. Yeats was a member of the Golden Dawn and was interested in the metaphysical and the esoteric, and I feel there’s a bit of that going on here too, someone in a tormented mental and emotional state who longs for the simple peace - who is longing for the great heart’s core (or coeur!)!
Thanks again for a really interesting look at a wonderful poem
❤🙏
All undergraduates should listen to this "unknotting" of The Lake Isle of Innisfree!
Thank you so much. How wonderful and miraculous!
I enjoyed this unknotting. Thank you Dana Gioia.🙏🏽🌸
Thank you, had to go thru similar untieing & appreciating of Keats's 'To Autumn' - it's nice to do this process with another while at a place like the poem describes.
Thank you. This reminds me of the intensely captivating and spell-binding lectures I heard 50 years ago at University from my favourite lecturers.
You and I had the good luck of having a few great teachers.
A wonderful analysis. There is but one extra level of anlaysis to note and that is of topography. Inisfree or in Irish (an Ghaeilge) Inis Fraoigh, is a lake that situates in Co Sligo. This is important ss Yeats was intimately linked with Sligo and the topography of that county is recounted in his references in other poems to Ben Bulben. His final resting place is at Drumcliff also in Sligo. Another thing to note is that in the Irish language we have two main words for isle/island. One is oileán and the other inis. Now, inis is usually anglicised as 'inish' hence the pronounication of Yeats' poem The Lake Isle of Innisfree shoukd be 'Inishfree'. This, then, more closely reflects the original language pronounciation of Inis Fraoigh (-igh in Irish is almost wholly silent or palatized).
An inis (isle) has a meaning of a small lake or wet area between rivers and thus a kind of watery meadow. It can also mean a proper lake, but in placenames it usually denotes a watery area between rivers, as in the case of Ennis, the main town in Co Clare, where the name derives from a dry area between tributaries of the Fergus river, making it like a dry patch in a wet landscape.
Go míle maith agat, tá sé álainn dán! Beir bua ó Bhaile Átha Cliath!
Beautifully presented. 💎 Thank you.
So lucky to have found this video. Brilliant analysis and thank you for making this video
Thank you so so much Mr Dana Gioia, for this magnificent analysis of this poem. Best wishes, Sir.
A helpful explanation of this poem (and others). Thank you. I wish I'd had you as my English teacher; it would have made lessons more interesting, meaningful, and enjoyable.
Such a wonderful channel, this will be my go-to study class on Saturday nights :) x
Thanks, Dana! I just shared this video with my team at Cæsura!
Thank you so much. It was beautiful.
This was beautiful and brilliantly done.
Marvellous! Thank you. 🙏
Perfect for me. Loved it!
Wonderful, thank you.
This was immensely interesting, thank you!
Wow! I will be using this as part of an introduction to a high school sophomore English unit on poetry. I have a MA in English literature and have admired this poem but I never noticed the allusion to the Parable of the Prodigal Son in many readings. Thank you.
Wonderful 😊
When I first read the poem (40 years ago), I also thought that Lake Isle of Innisfree referred to a place of "inner free"dom, a place of inner peace.
Excellent unknotting of a poem.
Wonderful explanation. Thank you, Mr. Gioia.
Very good !
watching the video gave me joy and peace.. thank you for this nice analysis 🙏🏻😌(tek Türk benim sanırım..)
❤🙏
Thank you.
Thank you very much 👍🏻🧡
Ive heard a radio recording of Yeats talking about this poem. He said he had come to hate it. It was a product of his fanciful youth and not, in his opinion a good poem. He read it in the very odd stilted way people read poetry back then.
Yeats did not come to dislike the poem. He felt imprisoned by its fame when so much of his other work was less recognized. He recorded the poem three times. All the rest of his poems with one exception went unrecorded. A great loss.
I always thought that Yeats's aspiration to plant "bean-rows" was a reference to Thoreau's Walden, where Henry David writes, Meanwhile my beans, the length of whose rows, added together, was seven miles already planted, were impatient to be hoed, for the earliest had grown considerably before the latest were in the ground; indeed they were not easily to be put off. What was the meaning of this so steady and self-respecting, this small Herculean labor, I knew not. I came to love my rows, my beans, though so many more than I wanted. They attached me to the earth, and so I got strength like Antaeus.
Methinks he was alluding to the stinking farts that would follow from chowing on so much beans - from the core of color's core.
Loved this, thank you. I wonder too if there is a contrast of England to Ireland, with all the political implications?
Thank you
Thanks a lot
Not only the story of the Prodigal Son, but also Psalm 55:6 mirrors the message of this poem.
The wattle and clay (daub) house is an allusion to a type of dwelling place - the Iron Age Celtic roundhouse - so there is a Celtic revivalist aspiration to the image of Inisfree Yeats imagines here. It is a calling for Irish immigrants to return home as the prodigal son willing to serve the highly idealised rural lifestyle offered by some republicans at the time. That is the lesson we were taught to read in it during lessons in school.
❤
What is term we can use for sound of mosquito 🦟 when we desperately want to sleep and it makes sure to disturb you with that noise.. well in a part of planet where we live it's a common thing we started looking with "Bhin-bhi-na-na" 😅 I like the episode . Quote informative.
Absolutely fascinating stuff, and well read and interpreted. One thing, though: Innisfree is pronounced 'Innish Free'
Thanks
HALF A VERSE
(For one (D. Gioia's 03-25-2021) appreciated W. B. Yeats presentation.)
One may see need of both: wild, lone;
and this blind and tame
that is not so hard to understand. (c)JMD!
...and although he longs to go back to Ireland, he wishes for isolation from its people. Implying he finds both equilly tiring weather English or Irish, it's only his native land he longs for.
I have never been able to get into poetry outside of its use in song lyrics. I love the written word. I adore fiction, but poetry always makes me zone out mentally. I am not sure why I have never gotten into it. I appreciate it as an art form but I am rarely entertained by it. It seems somehow pretentious a lot of times. Im not sure if its the flowery phrasing or the over use of metaphor. Maybe it is all these things. Or perhaps I am not terribly sophisticated. That is a real possibility.
Song is where all poetry began. Perhaps song will lead you deeper into poetry.
I would love to hear you analyze "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg.
I would have welcomed some discussion of the meter of the poem. As Ezra Pound said, poetry begins to die when it gets too far from Music.
Would you please do The Wild Swans at Coole?
❤🙏
analyzing a poem is the surest way to rob it of its magic
Just a note from an Irish person: Innisfree is natively pronounced InnISH-free; i.e. with a slight emphasis on the end of 'Innis' (and with an 'ish' rather than an 'iss' sound) instead of the 'free'. You can't really hear it in Yeat's recording (unless you're listening for it) due to the poor quality and his forced cadence. Innisfree is the Anglicisation of the Gaelic word ''Inis Fraoch' (pronounced Innish-Free-uch, Inis being the Irish for island), meaning, as mentioned in the video 'Island of Heather'.
Innisfree is on Lough Gill, by which Yeat's grandfather lived. The Hill of Grianan forms the lake's eastern shore - Grianán being an Irish word describing a sunny place, or (more relevantly) a place of outstanding natural beauty. Yeat's isn't just talking about returning to any old natural place; he's talking about returning to a place where nature is in her glory - the antithesis of the speaker's condition.
Its just a small point, maybe made already, but the pronunciation of Innisfree in Ireland would be Innishfree, and that is how everyone there says it. The recording by Yeats is indistinct at that point but here is Adrian Dunbar reading it: czcams.com/video/1VgV8_mQaw4/video.html
The reason is to do with Irish place names being anglised hundreds of years ago and ending up approximating an original Irish phrase, but looking English. Eg Cnoc Mór or big hill would have been turned into Knockmore by British mapmakers, but people knew the original Irish words so often kept the Irish language pronunciations, in this case Inis is a word that means island, and is pronounced Inish.
Why is it that presenters so often don’t look at the camera; the viewer?
The line that made me love poetry: "I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree"
Beneath the serious coastal sun
Tenacious men the waters rode
A-shuttling pearls from port to port
Each City plays its special ode
Some sing of spice, some sing of gold
Some sing of maidens' dewy youth
All sing of stories long foretold
And legends which predate the truth.
Of jowls strong, and piercing eyes
Their famous sign: effective deeds
Should scoundrels try their patient mien
Their teeth will rest among the weeds
Sweet babes and wives in huts await
Return by dawn, at breaking light
For countless morns the bride on shore
With baited hope did strain her sight
The mother's first, at journey's end
That boy her womb in earnest bore
That moment as the men descend
is torn 'twixt hope and deathly sore
Not all were loosed from Father Sea's
Besalted grip which men devours
At parting's chime no sailor's son
Can bank on lengthened years or hours
Oh Delmon's sons - you nameless lot
You plied your trade on sandy shores
Before the wand'ring prophet preached
Before the Arab falcon sores
When Gods to man - as man to self -
The passion's fiery fugues relayed
When psyche was a public weal
On golden temples' roofs displayed
The highest drive, with eyes upturned
To be a man, in fullest sense
Possessed of gold, esteem and mates
Select of God, without pretense
in -is -free no confines to the intellect.
Grey pavement for me is not unpleasant. It’s is heartless, devoid of finer emotions.