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'A significant component of the contemporary intoxicating lure or fascination of islands has to do with the fact that they suggest themselves as tabulae rasae; potential laboratories for any conceivable human project, in thought or in action' (Baldacchino, 2007).
'The Lake Isle of lnnisfree'1 is one of W.B. Yeats's most anthologised poems (Harmon, 1998), and arguably his most famous and best-loved. In a millennium poll in 1999, the Irish Times and Poetry Ireland asked readers to choose their favourite Irish poems of all time, and 'The Lake Isle' comfortably topped the list (in fact, 25 of the top 100 poems were by Yeats, with six of those in the top ten) (Dorgan, 1999). And in a 1935 BBC recording of Yeats reciting his own poem, the 1923 Nobel Laureate rather archly introduced it by acknowledging that 'It is the only poem of mine which is very widely known' (Yeats, 1997).2
'The Lake Isle of lnnisfree' is notionally set on a small island in Lough Gill, Sligo, in the north-west of Ireland (Figure 1). It was composed in a London suburb in 1888 and first published in the National Observer in 1890 (Jeffares, 1968, p. 32). In many ways it is a typical late-Victorian poem, with its slightly archaic diction and syntax, and its classic romantic tension between the city and the countryside. In other ways though, it is a very modern poem, and the binary opposition between the centre and the margins can also be read, allegorically, as a critique of colonialism, with the titular isle, 'lnnisfree', evoking notions of national as well as personal freedom. It is this richly suggestive and ambivalent relationship between word and world that Seamus Heaney (1984, p. 132) calls 'the sense of place': that 'feeling, assenting, equable marriage between the geographical country and the country of the mind'.
Heaney's poetical description is obviously directed towards poetry, but his psychogeographical exploration of language can usefully be applied to other forms of discourse as well. I was thinking of this on a recent visit home to Sligo, where I was once again struck by the numerous commercial and cultural references to 'lnnisfree' throughout the town and county, ostensibly inspired by the poem.3 You can now stay at the lnnisfree Hotel...