The Song of Wandering Aengus analysis

Aengus enters a hazel wood, catches a silver trout, and sees it become a girl who calls his name before vanishing.^[1]

Old age has not ended his pursuit: the brief vision becomes the organizing desire of his life.^[2]

The poem makes desire both exhausting and sustaining. The girl remains powerful because she appears only long enough to become an ideal.^[2]

The ending leaves the search unresolved, balancing obsession with imaginative hope.^[3]

• Longing and unattainable desire

  A momentary encounter governs a lifetime because the desired figure remains out of reach.^[2]

• Myth and transformation

  I dropped the berry in a stream

  And caught a little silver trout.

  The ordinary fishing scene turns into myth through sudden transformation.

• Age and eternity

  The speaker’s old age contrasts with his promise to gather the moon’s and sun’s apples “till time and times are done.”

The poem has three eight-line stanzas and a ballad-like narrative movement. Its underlying rhythm is mostly iambic tetrameter.^[4]

Yeats uses slant rhyme rather than mechanical exact rhyme, a flexibility that keeps the song strange and conversational.^[4]

• Transformation

  It had become a glimmering girl

  With apple blossom in her hair

  The trout’s change shifts the poem from practical action to supernatural desire.

• Symbolism

  The silver apples of the moon,

  The golden apples of the sun.

  The paired apples suggest an ideal harvest beyond ordinary human time.^[3]

• Repetition

  Who called me by my name and ran

  And faded through the brightening air.

  Repeated conjunctions carry the speaker forward toward a reunion that never occurs.

The poem was first printed in 1897 and collected in The Wind Among the Reeds in 1899.^[2]

Aengus draws on Irish mythology, but Yeats reshapes the figure into a personal dramatic monologue about pursuit.^[2]

• “unrequited love—or any other unattainable dream—can both exhaust a person's energies and nourish a person's imagination.”

• “Yeats’s poem adheres to the four-beat iambic tetrameter, which lends the poem the songlike quality common to ballads.”

1. Wikisource
2. LitCharts
3. Poem Analysis
4. eNotes