Today’s Poem: The Song of Wandering Aengus

Plucking the golden apples of the sun on St. Patrick’s Day

John Bauer, Princess Tuvstarr Gazing into the Dark Waters of the Forest Tarn, 1913 (Wikimedia Commons)

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The Song of Wandering Aengus

by William Butler Yeats

I went out to the hazel wood, 
Because a fire was in my head, 
And cut and peeled a hazel wand, 
And hooked a berry to a thread; 
And when white moths were on the wing, 
And moth-like stars were flickering out, 
I dropped the berry in a stream 
And caught a little silver trout. 
 
When I had laid it on the floor 
I went to blow the fire a-flame, 
But something rustled on the floor, 
And someone called me by my name: 
It had become a glimmering girl 
With apple blossom in her hair 
Who called me by my name and ran 
And faded through the brightening air. 
 
Though I am old with wandering 
Through hollow lands and hilly lands, 
I will find out where she has gone, 
And kiss her lips and take her hands; 
And walk among long dappled grass, 
And pluck till time and times are done, 
The silver apples of the moon, 
The golden apples of the sun.
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Today’s Poem, by William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), has been, in the century-and-change of its existence, much anthologized, often recited, frequently sung. A sentimental favorite, in that vein of the young Yeats who wore like a mantle the bardic wisdom of venerable age, “The Song of Wandering Aengus” feels like a poem that has never not been written, never not recited at festivals of Irish dance, never not rendered in song. It feels, and is meant to feel, like a cultural artifact far older than it is.

Yeats himself claimed Greek folk song as his inspiration, noting that “folk belief” of the Greeks resembled that of the Irish. On one level the poem is meant to invest Irish mythology with the level of cultural significance that attends the whole iconography of classical myth. The title identifies the poem’s speaker as an Irish god, who according to legend fell in love with a woman whom he saw only in dreams. Alternatively, or simultaneously, the poem taps into the aisling (ASH-lin) tradition in Irish poetry, in which the elusive dream woman is an otherworldly figure for Ireland itself, in a primordial pagan form, signaling the rebirth of a lost authentic Irish identity.

Either way, or both ways at once, in three tetrameter octets “The Song of Wandering Aengus” narrates a reversal of the Cupid-and-Psyche myth, in which its male protagonist’s life is consumed by the quest for this vanished woman. But unlike Psyche, who wanders the world in unremitting despair, weeping for what her own folly has cost her, this speaker — “though I am old with wandering” — continues in the conviction that he will find what he seeks: those beautiful “silver apples of the moon, / . . . golden apples of the sun.”

What is it about this poem, written sometime in the 1890s and included in the 1899 Wind Among the Reeds, that arrests our attention so? It’s not simply that Yeats, who had spend the previous decade in London among the Pre-Raphaelites, was beating them at their own nostalgic game of artifact-making — though clearly he was.

And it’s not simply that the poem manages to operate seamlessly on multiple levels, at once bardic, integrating separate skeins of culture into one tale, and immediately political, concerning the revival of a transcendent Irish identity. It’s not even that it manages, as the earlier “Lake Isle of Innisfree” had done, to elevate to the level of myth an actual place in Ireland: this time, Hazelwood, near Sligo Town.

Hazelwood, with its own lake isle, c. 1890 (Wikimedia Commons)

Any intelligent person can have an idea, or a complex of ideas, but only an artist can render idea as art. However interested we may be in the vista of ideas underlying this poem, that alone doesn’t explain the hold the poem exerts on a wider cultural imagination. We can say that what’s compelling about this poem is its beauty — but what makes it beautiful?

From its first iambic tetrameter line, the poem establishes a regularity of meter that quickly becomes hypnotic. Where, in other poems, metrical variation and substitution achieve emotional effect, every movement in this poem happens within the bounds of this absolute regularity. Even when added syllables occur, as in line 6 — “And moth-like stars were flickering out” — the pulse is strong enough to guide the reader to hear its four distinct beats, and to read “flickering” as a disyllabic word (an effect repeated in subsequent stanzas, in such words as “glimmering” and “brightening”).

The poem’s I, its storyteller, exerts his authority over the telling even on this most basic level of sound, commanding the tale to be heard in precisely this way. If we’re willing, we skeptical modern readers, to believe anything this voice tells us, its perceptible authority, embedded in the meter, is one reason why.

Alice Broughton, photograph of William Butler Yeats, 1903 (Wikimedia Commons)

The principle of repetition, in both whole words and sounds, adds to this voice’s power of enchantment. “I went out to the hazel wood” — a beginning like that of so many ballads, with a speaker walking out and falling into some adventure or other — becomes, in line 3, “I cut and peeled a hazel wand,” a line pleasing both in its repeated liquid sounds and in its neat metrical and linguistic parallel to line 1. The way “hazel wood” becomes “hazel wand” is, again, deeply pleasurable: the logical outcome of going into a hazel wood, a move from something general to something specific enough to hold in the hand, but also an incantation, in which one thing is transformed, by the merest shift of sound, into another.

A similar thing happens in lines 5 and 6, in the transition from the implied flicker of literal white moths to the “moth-like” stars and their more literal “flickering” as the night fades. Likewise, the “fire . . . in my head” of line 2 finds an echo in the “fire” of line 10. We assume that this second mention of fire refers to the fire in the hearth — which of course makes sense on a literal level — but there’s also the possibility that this is the same internal, visionary “fire” that has driven him out of doors to begin with, and which now he means to stoke.

Certainly it’s at this moment that events in the tale begin, so strangely, to catch fire. But the rhyme with “flame” in this second stanza is “name” — the speaker’s name, which the magical “glimmering girl” calls, both in the moment of his blowing the fire and in her flight from him, and which seems, via the end-rhyme, to connect the fire with the man himself.

The repeated liquid m-sounds of this stanza, picked up in the girl’s “glimmering” and in the “blossom” in her hair, mingle the appearance of this girl with the identity, the “name,” of the man who bears the “flame” in himself. His imagination seems to conjure her. Yet by the stanza’s end she has broken free, physically and sonically, from that aural spell, and “faded through the brightening air.”

Even in the final stanza, when the speaker wanders in exile, and we might expect the spell to be broken, the enchantment isn’t over. It’s cast, now, as a vision of the future, its hope an iron certainty made more persuasive by a continuation of the same principles that generated the preceding two stanzas with their magic.

The lines repeat themselves metrically, as they do throughout the poem, but also with the same kinds of sonic shifts that marked the beginning. “Though” in the first line of that concluding stanza, for example, becomes “through” in the second. Just as the “hazel wood” becomes a “hazel wand,” “hollow lands” become “hilly lands,” a whole journey undertaken in a few words, most of them the same. The poem ends in a rush of phrases conjoined by “and” — all the things the speaker envisions that he will do, accelerated as the sentence extends and extends itself, to culminate in that final, repeated imagery: “The silver apples of the moon, / The golden apples of the sun.”

It’s worth remembering that this poem represents the early Yeats, with many phases of development, and many of his greatest poems, still before him. Though “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” had appeared even earlier, he was still years away from “The Second Coming” or “Sailing to Byzantium,” those demanding, difficult poems that make clear the massive reach of his vision and voice.

But in this poem we can see the poet who would write those poems — the poet who could, already, produce a poem complex in its concerns and intricate in its art. If we love this poem, it merits that love and more. Its beauty invites our affection, but moreover, as those later great poems would demonstrate, the poet’s authority commands our awe.

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