# The Song of Wandering Aengus analysis

The Song of Wandering Aengus — W. B. Yeats (1899)

Yeats turns a fleeting supernatural encounter into a lifelong search for love, beauty, and an unattainable ideal.

Full text from [The Song of Wandering Aengus](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Song_of_Wandering_Aengus). Public domain in the US (Collected in 1899 and public domain in the United States.).

## Summary

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

```
I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
```

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

## Meaning and interpretation

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

```
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
```

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

## Themes

### 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.”

## Form and meter

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]

## Literary devices

### 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.

## Historical context

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]

## What critics say

> “unrequited love—or any other unattainable dream—can both exhaust a person's energies and nourish a person's imagination.”
>
> — [LitCharts](https://www.litcharts.com/poetry/william-butler-yeats/the-song-of-wandering-aengus)

> “Yeats’s poem adheres to the four-beat iambic tetrameter, which lends the poem the songlike quality common to ballads.”
>
> — [eNotes](https://www.enotes.com/topics/song-wandering-aengus/analysis)

## Common questions

### What is the poem’s meaning?

A fleeting vision becomes a lifelong search for love, beauty, or an unattainable ideal.

### What are its themes?

Longing, transformation, myth, aging, and the sustaining power of imagination.

### What meter does it use?

Mostly iambic tetrameter, with ballad-like movement and flexible slant rhyme.

## References

- [Wikisource](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Song_of_Wandering_Aengus)

- [LitCharts](https://www.litcharts.com/poetry/william-butler-yeats/the-song-of-wandering-aengus)

- [Poem Analysis](https://poemanalysis.com/william-butler-yeats/the-song-of-wandering-aengus/)

- [eNotes](https://www.enotes.com/topics/song-wandering-aengus/analysis)

## Open the editor

Write with this poem’s meter in the editor: https://lyriic.com/write/iambic-tetrameter