A touch of Yeats

Sep 09, 2022

William Butler Yeats, 'The Song of Wandering Aengus'

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.

About the author

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was an Irish poet and playwright. He was a central figure in the Irish Literary Revival and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.

Curators' Corner

Our guest curator this week is David Spooner, a retired teacher of English and an alumnus of St Catherine's College, Oxford. He suggested this poem, and here he explains why:

'I've had this poem by heart since I was young. Now I am old and able to look back on how it has changed for me and how my reasons for liking it have shifted.

Yeats's song , musical and dreamlike, offers that magical intervention that will transform a young life from the ordinary to the driven, from the daily business to the lifelong search for a glimpsed and compelling vision. It's the unavoidable lure of the imagination towards a dream of what might be. And it's personal — the glimmering girl calls him by his name twice, a summons that he willingly follows, and he is convinced that he will be with her forever and even reach for the mysterious silver apples of the moon and golden apples of the sun. The imagined becomes real.

I admire Yeats's poem because it is a beautiful composition that meets a young man's fanciful desires, but also because it displays for any reader of any age, even for an octogenarian, what it is, and was, to be young and captivated by the imagination.'

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The Ten Minute Book Club: https://www.english.ox.ac.uk/ten-minute-book-club

Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/

Standard Ebooks: https://standardebooks.org/

“Five Tips to Get Reading Again if You’ve Struggled During the Pandemic,” The Conversation (8 January 2021): https://theconversation.com/five-tips-to-get-reading-again-if-youve-struggled-during-the-pandemic-152904

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