"The Madness of King Goll" & "The Lake Isle of Innisfree"

At the heart of both poems, Yeats is preoccupied with Ireland's ancien regime, with social change, and with modernity. Both poems feature narrators torn between the natural or felt, and immanent reality, and in both this is symptomatic of an identity paradox.  Yeats as poet seems to be suffering his own (invented?) identity crisis by writing in formal, rhymed meter but employing ambiguous, difficult symbolism. 

"The Madness of King Goll" (a monologue, in six sonnet like stanzas): The poem is a lyrical history of the poetic spirit of Ireland that has each stanza, or each chapter in Ireland's history, clamoring to be heard. The competing, incessant voices of the past, which are identified in italics at the end of each stanza as the "beech leaves old" ("leaves" here have the handy double meaning of a trees' green foliage and the pages of a book) haunt King Goll, the putative Irish monarch/embodiment of Irish spirit. To emphasize the disconnect Yeats has written the third and fifth stanzas in the past tense and the fourth in the present; the events are so confused or mixed up in Goll's mind that they are remembered out of order. Roughly each of the events can be correlated to an epoch in Irish history: the 1st, druidic; the 2nd early Catholic/St. Patrick; the 3rd medieval Ireland (from which the symbol of the Irish soul, "a whirling and a wandering fire", is forged); the 4th is the present, with the speaker seeking respite from the modern world in the natural yet feeling his own mortality; the 5th early modern, featuring the samizdat~esque "tympan"; the 6th  and final the symbolic disconnect between ancient and modern. The final stanza features the ambiguous symbol of "wires", which seem to be clipped, freeing the speaker but stealing something from him as well.  

"The Lake Isle of Innisfree" (dactylic hexameter? alternating on the last line of each stanza with pentameter, maybe in the style of classical poetics, and so pointing up the ancient vs. modern). The speaker longs for a monastic life in the country, where he will adopt older ways of living. In this slower world, time seems to become inverted: "midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow", suggesting an escape from aging. In the third and final stanza, the irony of the speaker's longing is suggested by his day to day surroundings, the modern infrastructure of "roadways" and "pavements grey". The disconnection between Yeat's speakers' longings is located in his "deep heart's core"; this may also be the only place where his desire will be fulfilled. 

Questions There is a discrepancy between the speaker of "King Goll", and the title, which labels him "mad". Who should we believe, or to what degree is the "madness" of Goll ironic? What is Yeats' attitude to Goll, and those who would describe him as mad? 

What does Yeats accomplish by making the connection between the "wires" and the "whirling and a wandering fire" ambiguous? Is "King Goll's" meaning diluted by the range of interpretations (Catholic, political, ontological)? 

 

How are realistic details at play in "The Lake Isle of Innisfree"? Are the poem's description of the natural convincing? On how many levels?