Summary
The poem begins with its speaker—presumably Aengus—deciding to go into the woods, driven by a feeling of passion or impatience. Once there, while moths swarmed and stars flickered, he carved a fishing pole out of a hazel branch. Attaching a berry to the pole, he cast it into the stream. Soon after, he caught a fish. He laid the fish down and went to build a fire, but suddenly heard someone calling his name. Looking around, he saw that the fish had transformed into a girl, who wore apple blossoms in her hair. The girl, calling his name, ran away and disappeared into the forest.
Now, the speaker has grown old as he wanders endlessly through hills and valleys, searching for this elusive woman. He is sure that he will find her. When he does, he imagines, he will kiss her, hold her hands, and wander in the tall grass with her. The two of them will pick the sun and moon as if they were picking apples.
Analysis
W.B. Yeats was a major figure in the movement known as the Irish Revival or Celtic Revival. This movement adapted, recorded, and celebrated the cultural history of Ireland, and in particular the folklore and language of the nation's Celtic people. "The Song of Wandering Aengus" offers an example of Yeats writing in this mode. Aengus is an Irish god (he also appears in the folklore of other Celtic cultures, such as that of Scotland), associated with love, youth, and poetry. Some of the legends describing Aengus detail his pining after a woman he sees in his dreams. This particular poem does not explicitly reference those legends, but it does work through themes of unrequited love. Moreover, the poem has a dreamlike mood, in which time passes in surprising ways, and in which magical events are treated as entirely normal.
This dreamlike mood, moreover, is just one of the folktale-like attributes of the work. Yeats borrows a great deal here from the style of folklore. For instance, he depicts characters with intense but simple, exaggerated motives and characteristics. This is typical in folktales, where characters tend to be vivid yet flat. Yeats also uses a consistent, simple rhythm, reminiscent of folk ballads and oral narrative. The poem's iambic tetrameter lines each contain eight syllables, with stress on every second syllable. This makes them memorable and catchy, linking the work to folksong as much as to the formal innovations of Yeats's modernist peers.
Even considering the seemingly intentional flatness of the work's characters, Aengus's optimism comes across as surprising. He confesses to growing old over the course of an exhausting search, and yet professes total faith in his ability to find and enjoy the love of the mysterious woman. His love appears unrequited, to a degree that his hope does not seem entirely rational. At the same time, it is the inaccessibility and elusiveness of his beloved that makes Aengus's quest compelling. Reader investment is driven by the mystery surrounding the woman, and by the contradictions in the way she is described: for example, she calls Aengus's name, but also runs away from him. The unanswered questions that attend the woman's appearance seem to motivate the speaker, and certainly provide an eerie suspense that motivates the reader.
In addition, the poem's images evoke a world of fluidity and flexibility, in which Aengus's hope does not seem entirely displaced. The poem begins with a subtle transformation: Aengus transforms a twig into a fishing pole. Other, even subtler, transformations appear in the first stanza as well, in the form of figurative language. For instance, stars are described as "moth-like." This is not in and of itself a description of an object changing form, but the frequency and vividness of simile and metaphor in this poem nevertheless suggest a reality in which seemingly disparate phenomena are linked to one another, such that boundaries are not entirely fixed. Meanwhile, the poem's most abrupt and vivid transformation occurs in its second stanza, when the fish transforms into a girl. After this, less overtly fantastical transformations again take center stage. Aengus himself grows old, an organic and naturalistic change that transmutes him from one form to another. He also vividly imagines picking the sun and moon as if picking apples, again evoking a kind of metaphorical transformation, in which the lines between two different elements of nature—the celestial and the earthly—become blurred.
These constant transformations not only reinforce the dreamlike mood of the poem, but also provide an implicit justification for Aengus's feelings of hope against all odds. Because he inhabits a milieu full of unexpected and joyful transformations, it seems relatively plausible that his own circumstances, too, might be subject to such a rapid change. Seen through this lens, Aengus's aging is not cause for despair. Instead, it is evidence of a kind of universal transmutability, which is itself cause for hopefulness.
