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William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” uses the speaker’s recollection of an excursion to an idyllic world as a vehicle through which the reader embarks on a similar journey in the span of three short stanzas. In order to take the reader on this journey from the familiar to the transcendent natural world, Yeats dislocates and challenges the reader’s ingrained sense of perspective. Instead of establishing a distance between speaker and reader, Yeats fuses the reader’s perspective into the speaker’s memory of a detached and physically separate island. The fact that Yeats’s speaker never actually goesto Innisfree during the poem is crucial to the development of this union between the speaker and the reader. The speaker’s physical separation from Innisfree, even when describing its most intimate details, allows the reader an important degree of accessibility to the isle and, subsequently, to the memory …