Comparing Yeat's "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" to "Heaven" by Cathy Song
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- Category: English: Poetic Works
- Date Submitted: 03/17/2011 02:10 PM
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The Desirability of Desire:
comparing and contrasting the use of longing in
“The Lake Isle of Innisfree” by W. B. Yeats and “Heaven” by Cathy Song
Cathy Song and W. B. Yeats are poets from completely different eras and cultural backgrounds. In spite of these initial differences their works are connected by a similar theme. Although the poems “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” and “Heaven” by Yeats and Song respectively are bound by the common theme of longing, their use of poetic expression, most importantly of diction, style and meter, leads the poems to be completely different from each other in tone.
The sense of longing that is prominently present in both poems is explained through the contrast both poets create by employing a different kind of diction when referring to a different place. In ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree”, Yeats uses a wide range of positive terms when referring to Innisfree, not only to convey the depth of the speaker’s longing for it, but also to conjure up an image of the isle as a place of simple happiness in the mind of the reader (“And I shall have some peace there,”, line 5), thus explaining the speaker’s strong wish to be there. This is strengthened further by the considerably more negative way in which the speaker’s current environment is described, the one he is trying to escape from (“While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavement’s grey,”, line 11). The same concept is applied in Song’s “Heaven”. Here, the place where the speaker is presently residing, America, is spoken of rather negatively (“It’s still the wild west, / mean and grubby,”, lines 30-31), while the favourable description of the longed for China goes so far as to even refer to it in the title as ‘Heaven’.
Even though the diction in these poems for the both of them is used to construct the same idea, that of the desire to be somewhere one is not, it does contribute to a different overall style.
The speaker in “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”, while bringing across...
comparing and contrasting the use of longing in
“The Lake Isle of Innisfree” by W. B. Yeats and “Heaven” by Cathy Song
Cathy Song and W. B. Yeats are poets from completely different eras and cultural backgrounds. In spite of these initial differences their works are connected by a similar theme. Although the poems “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” and “Heaven” by Yeats and Song respectively are bound by the common theme of longing, their use of poetic expression, most importantly of diction, style and meter, leads the poems to be completely different from each other in tone.
The sense of longing that is prominently present in both poems is explained through the contrast both poets create by employing a different kind of diction when referring to a different place. In ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree”, Yeats uses a wide range of positive terms when referring to Innisfree, not only to convey the depth of the speaker’s longing for it, but also to conjure up an image of the isle as a place of simple happiness in the mind of the reader (“And I shall have some peace there,”, line 5), thus explaining the speaker’s strong wish to be there. This is strengthened further by the considerably more negative way in which the speaker’s current environment is described, the one he is trying to escape from (“While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavement’s grey,”, line 11). The same concept is applied in Song’s “Heaven”. Here, the place where the speaker is presently residing, America, is spoken of rather negatively (“It’s still the wild west, / mean and grubby,”, lines 30-31), while the favourable description of the longed for China goes so far as to even refer to it in the title as ‘Heaven’.
Even though the diction in these poems for the both of them is used to construct the same idea, that of the desire to be somewhere one is not, it does contribute to a different overall style.
The speaker in “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”, while bringing across...