The Song of Wandering Aengus Essay Questions

How does the poem's meter affect the reading experience?

This work is written in a highly regimented iambic tetrameter, with almost no divergence from this established meter. Iambic tetrameter means that each line of the work contains four iambs—two-syllable units with stress on the latter syllable—for a total of eight syllables. This meter causes each line to feel naturalistic, since it follows a relatively typical English stress pattern. At the same time, its lines are short, making them feel memorable, even quippy. This contributes to the poem's songlike quality, hinting at the bardic past and at the oral folklore from which Yeats drew inspiration for this work.

Discuss the relationship between this poem's speaker and the mythological figure of Aengus.

The Aengus identified as the speaker of this poem bears an indirect relationship to the Irish Celtic god on whom he is based. Yeats borrows from and riffs off of the existing Aengus myths in order to invent his own related story. For instance, one of the most famous myths surrounding Aengus is the tale of his search for a beautiful woman who appears to him in a dream. While the details of this poem's narrative are entirely altered, Yeats does employ the core narrative of Aengus's search for an elusive, phantomlike woman. Yeats's choice to invent his own tale about a mythological figure is in some ways fitting, since these myths already exist in many variants and retellings.