What is "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" trying to convey?

Well, there are plenty of meanings that this beautiful and
excellent poem could be argued to be trying to convey. People have variously argued that
this poem is about the beauty of transcendent nature, the simplicity of living or the
power of the imagination. I actually think, if we examine the life of the poet who wrote
this poem, we can argue that the poem is about the desire to return to a simpler form of
nostalgic existence.

Yeats himself possessed this
characteristic in the form of wanting to go back to Innisfree, which is a real small
island in county Sligo that he used to go to for holidays as a child. This poem was
created when Yeats was based in London and walking along Fleet street, which is an
incredibly busy and hectic section of this major capital city. As he was walking along,
he suddenly related the sound of the fountain to the sound that the water in Sligo lake
made. Note how this is refered to in the final stanza of the
poem:

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 heart it in the
deep heart's core.

We see
here the central opposition that drives the poem related to the theme of returning to a
simpler life. The "pavements grey" and the "roadway" are compared to the "lake water
lapping," and it is most definitely the latter that sustains the poem in the "deep
heart's core." This poem is above all about the desire to escape the busy present and
return to a childlike state of existence where everything is much
simpler.