1. William Butler Yeats
was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1865, the son of a well-known Irish painter, John Butler Yeats. He spent his childhood in County Sligo, where his parents were raised, and in London. Born into the Anglo-Irish landowning class, Yeats became involved with the Celtic Revival, a movement against the cultural influences of English rule in Ireland during the Victorian period, which sought to promote the spirit of Ireland's native heritage. Though Yeats never learned Gaelic himself, his writing at the turn of the century drew extensively from sources in Irish mythology and folklore. Also a potent influence on his poetry was the Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne, whom he met in 1889, a woman equally famous for her passionate nationalist politics and her beauty. Though she married another man in 1903 and grew apart from Yeats (and Yeats himself was eventually married to another woman, Georgie Hyde Lees), she remained a powerful figure in his poetry.
Yeats was deeply involved in politics in Ireland, and in the twenties, despite Irish independence from England, his verse reflected a pessimism about the political situation in his country and the rest of Europe. Appointed a senator of the Irish Free State in 1922, he is remembered as an important cultural leader, as a major playwright (he was one of the founders of the famous Abbey Theatre in Dublin), and as one of the very greatest poets—in any language—of the century. W. B. Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1923 and died in 1939 at the age of 73.

2. W. B. Yeats Thoor Ballylee

3. Thoor Ballylee: transformed into the family home of W. B. Yeats.

4. Thoor Ballylee was Yeats's monument and symbol; in both aspects it had multiple significance. It satisfied his desire for a rooted place in a known countryside, not far from Coole and his life-long friend Lady Gregory. To live in a Tower complemented, perhaps, his alignment with a tradition of cultivated aristocracy which he had envied and a leisured peace which he had enjoyed.

5. The tower or castle that Yeats bought was a sixteenth century norman castle built by the family de Burgo, or Burke. It consisted of four floors with one room on each, connected by a spiral stone stairway built into the seven-foot thickness of the massive outer wall. Each floor had a window overlooking the river which flowed alongside. At the top here was a flat roof reached by a final steep flight of steps from the floor below.

6. The tower had to be restored before Yeats could live in it
The tower had to be restored before Yeats could live in it. By the summer of 1919 Yeats and his wife and daughter had moved in. Yeats mentions Ballylee in a letter to Maud Gonne May 1918.
“ We hope to be in Ballylee in a month and there I dream of making a house that may encourage people to avoid ugly manufactured things - an ideal poor man's house. Except a very few things imported as models we should get all made in Galway or Limerick. I am told that our neighbours are pleased that we are not getting 'grand things but old Irish furniture.”

7. The poet William Yeats With old millboards and sea-green slates And smithy work from the Gort forge Restored this tower for my wife George And may these characters remain When all is ruin once again.

8. After the Yeats family moved out in 1929 it fell into disuse , but was restored as 'Yeats Tower' in 1965 and fitted out as a Yeats museum, containing an interesting collection of first editions as well as items of furniture. The adjoining cottage is fitted out as a tea room and shop. The tower has been wired for sound and a pre-recorded commentary can be played on a push-button system. In addition part of the ground floor has been adapted for an audio-visual presentation on the years of Yeats's occupancy.

9. Tour of the House
The Dining Room

10. Yeats’s
Bedroom
His Chair

11. Bedroom on the top floor

12. “The Winding Stair”

13. Door to the top of the tower

14. View from the top of the tower

15. “The purpose of rhythm. is to prolong the moment
“The purpose of rhythm is to prolong the moment when we are both asleep and awake, by hushing us with an alluring monotony, which holds us waking by variety, to keep us in that state of perhaps real trance, in which the mind liberated from the pressure of the will is unfolded in symbols In the making and in the understanding of a work of art, and the more easily if it is full of patterns and symbols and music, we are lured to the threshold of sleep, and it may be far beyond it, without knowing that we have ever set our feet upon the steps of horn or of ivory” (from Yeats, “The Symbolism of Poetry,” 1900).

16. Audio “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” http://www. poets. org/viewmedia

17. “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”
Why does the speaker vow to go to Innisfree, and how does the life he imagines living there compare to the one he now lives? In what ways might his imagined future seem like a return to the past?
Photograph of Lake Isle of Innisfree by Kenneth Allen (June 2008).

18. In his work The Trembling of the Veil (1922), Yeats 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.”

19. Literary Devices in “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build 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 where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
1st stanza
2nd stanza
3rd stanza

20. Rhyme Scheme: consistent end rhyme
Imagery: The poet creates pictures / images in the minds of the readers to stress a particular point. This poem has both strong visual and auditory imagery Visual imagery: (veils of the morning, midnight's all a glimmer, noon a purple glow, evening full of the linnet's wings) Auditory Imagery(bee-loud glade, cricket sings, lake water lapping) The images create a vivid picture of the place which gives a sense of inner peace and harmony.
Metaphors: veils of the morning, peace comes dropping slow
Alliteration: The repetition of consonant sounds, e.g. 'lake water lapping with low sounds.‘; repeated use of strong ‘L” sounds throughout the poem
Repetition: Certain words, sounds and even stanzas are repeated in a poem which serves to stress certain ideas, pictures / images, sounds or moods, e.g. 'dropping slow, dropping, I will... now'.