<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 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>
where is the lake isle of innisfree located
where is the lake isle of innisfree located
within Lough Gill , in County Sligo , Ireland
within Lough Gill , in County Sligo , Ireland