Abraham Thomas · 22 February 1999

I agree that there’s a marked shift in feeling in the last stanza, but the tone is not quite ‘weary’… ‘poignant’ is how I would put it.

Lots of undertones, though. Most especially, a sense of loss - all those years gone by, spent on a fruitless quest… what makes it all the more touching is Aengus’ determination not to give up on his search, his conviction that all will be well if he can but find his glimmering girl.

A heartbreakingly beautiful poem.

cvogel · 16 November 1999

I find that there can be mixtures of dreams with mythological belief in all thoughts of what love is. A seeking of an “ideal” …possibly having answers being found with in a belief system. There are at times a thought put into the brain as to what/who we should seek. Old myths talk of fairies coming to live in the human world though rituals and ernest seeking. Sometimes that human can spend an entire life searching. How memories/belief sytems become an avenue of search…..Desire becomes an attainable dream if we choose to wholeheartedly search.

Still a poetic dream……

Circe

Daniel Marsh · 9 July 2000

I seem to recall hearing this poem not once but twice on “Writer’s Almanac,” a daily 5-minute segment on Public Radio, where they speak of birthdays, aniverseries, and such for the day, and give one poem. There’s nothing quite like hearing Garrison Keeler read the poem, in that marvelous voice he has. It does something to re-affirm poetry as an auditory, as well as a strictly cereberal, artform.

But anyway, it is a very good poem, evocative of the old folk tales of faeries disguised as animals (one about a seal comes to mind) and men who persue them for their wives. I agree with the shift in tone, though there is something very positive about the way he speaks of finding her, and so though you feel that the odds are stacked against him, he will eventually find his “glimmering girl.”

I do love the last line, too. It definitely ranks up there in one of the loveliest lines in poetry.

Jacquelin Gribble · 21 September 2000

Yet another quest story. Ah but the quest’s the thing! Really the quest is all any of us have.

Jackie

William Sickels · 25 November 2000

Some observations on “Song of the Wandering Aengus”

This haunting, mystic poem by W. B, Yeats was popularized in the early ’70s by folksinger Judy Collins in her sung version, titled “Golden Apples of the Sun,” which is how I first learned of it. Her version differs, by choice or laxity, in three significant places, all of which are, in my view, lesser renderings of Yeats’ images.

He wrote that the silver trout had become “a glimmering girl”, “glistening” in her version.

The girl “faded through the brightening air.” She “vanished in …” for Ms. Collins.

In the poet’s intended search for this wondrous girl, he would find out where she has gone and “kiss her lips and take her hands” while Ms. Collins would merely “see her lips and take her hand.” The version she sings may have been phrased here to avoid lesbian connotations for a female singer, but it does seem weakened and a little strange.

In the first instance the figure may be glistening from its formar contact with the water but for it to glimmer is clearly indicative of a strange and changeable state and a better wording. Similarly, for the girl to “vanish” in the brightening air one may imagine an image merely disappearing in brighter air, but the phrase “faded through” comes closer to attempting to explain the magical process. Also the vanishing is apt to be a guicker action, while fading is prolonged and leads into the subsequent yearning, clearly a choice in keeping with the poem’s theme.

The line chosen for the song title is the same as that of a 1953 book of Ray Bradbury stories; he may also have enjoyed the poem. The theme of golden apples harks back to Greek mythology but I could find no linkup there with the sun, implying for me that it was Yeats’ connection, powerful and apparently thus well-remembered. Deservedly so, one of my favorite poems.

WHS

vico · 8 April 2001

The poem has a complete quality and it is a beautiful thing to recite, to read to think about even to look at. Its appeal does not diminish, it grows and like every beautiful thing it is not possible to tire of it.

The fire in the love-God’s head is the drive that makes all life worthwhile. In its simplist form this fire determines the outcome of our lives. The importance of the quest is the issue, no matter what the outcome may be. The Hazel Wood, the wand, the stripping, the threading, the hooking, the dropping and the catching are all life’s work and all so beautifully reduced to a single simple ancient act.

The quest, which remains unresolved at the poem’s end, survives and is almost fulfilled by the determination alone. This is a love-God’s song. I suspect he sang it throughout his love-God’s life and if love-Gods live as long as I think they do, then he is still singing it. So there is this eternal hope - a believer’s hope and the poet is young at the point of writing and youth is eternal.

The Silver and Golden Apples could be anything. I don’t know the Greek connection. I don’t want to know. They are a perfect fit, day or night, for any of life’s important fruits.

Vico.

Alexander O. Smith · 6 November 2001

In “Early Irish Myths and Sagas” (Penguin Classics) Jeffrey Gantz mentions that the story “The Dream of Oengus” (reproduced in full in this book) is the “ultimate source of Yeats’s poem ‘The Dream of Wandering Aengus’.” It is a very short story with only a few recognizable themes that seem to bear direct connection to Yeats’s poem, however. In the story, the girl approaches Oengus as he lay sleeping, and she vanishes as soon as he welcomes her. She continues to visit him in this fashion over the course of a year, and he falls in love with her, eventually embarking on a search to find her. She is described as wearing a silver necklace and a chain of burnished gold. While she does not assume the form of a fish, she apparently assumes the form of a bird one year and a human the next, so the tranformation theme is somewhat intact. If this really is the source for Yeats’s interpretation, I wonder where he came by the rest of the poem’s imagery.

Aditya_Bhashyam · 10 September 2002

Comments on The Song of Wandering Aengus

<and a leetil test of the comments system> (:

A lovely poem - to read and recite. And very poignant.

The repetition in the last 2 lines reminded me of Robert Frost’s ‘miles to go…miles to go…’.
- a feeling of longing.

Do the Golden Apples remind you of Perseus?

aditya.

Francesco Tartaglia · 8 January 2003

Beautiful! Realism, economy, sensuousness.

Daniela.

Noname Noway · 14 January 2003

William Butler Yeats’ poem The Song of the Wandering Aengus is much simpler than what I hear you make it to be. It is the story of the 3 stages of a man, if he is intelligent and lucky.

First, it is the trout that is the object of desire. But trout are mythical creatures told by elders as the prize of prizes, but elusive and hard to catch. It takes skill and wile to trick the animal onto the hook and then, you must have reflexes like fire to set the hook and a firm gentleness to bring it to net. So, we tell our young ones of the valor to be gained by catching this little piece of silver and, fools that they are, will get up at 4:00 am to try and fish amongst the impenetrable tangles of willow for the prize of manhood and recognition.

But this young man does not follow the rules. He instead strips a willow wand and hooks a berry to a thread. No invisible leader, royal coachman and 3 piece fly rod here. This young man is a king and he acts with an internal motivation regardless of the rules of angling. He has become innocent of the rules because he has a fire in his head and responds to it.

He catches a little silver trout but does not throw it back because it is too small he keeps it and returns to his abode with only one fish, not enough to make a meal, but enough, to satisfy the soul. Here he is changed into an individual who has his own motivations rather than those handed down to him by others, by the group.

Sure enough, as soon as he begins his objective treatment of the fish it is no longer a fish but a girl, with apple blossoms in her hair. This is the second myth, the myth of love and desire that fades when the light grows stronger. Her’s is the beauty of the world and flowers adorn her as naturally as a fruit tree in spring time. These are the experiences of a grown man who sees and desires the fruit of the world. It is Aengus that is hooked now and he will travel through hollow lands and hilly lands to discover where she went but she is never found, or, is found many, many times.

Here is the big change. She is no longer the object of desire, she is no longer a myth, she is real and he will find her and kiss her real lips and take her real hands and they together will enjoy the apples found in the night and in the day. Both are real and they are both delicious as he is delicious to her. He now knows that his quest is ancient as he is ancient and that the world is old and right and wonderful. There is no sadness in his awareness or that his journey is endless and repeated endlessly. He knows who he is and he sees and knows the world and that is enough.

RHR

Gérard Ducasse · 9 April 2003

The song of Wandering Aengus by W.B.Yeats.

This is my favourite poem in the English language. I have tried repeatedly to analyse the reasons of its appeal. This is as far as I have got.

First, there is the sonorous lilt of the poetic phrase, but it is not the only poem of my knowledge, that posseses such musicality. Then there is the poignancy of unfulfilled love. We know Yeats is thinking of Maud Gonne.

“Though I am old from wandering…
I will find out where she has gone.”

Further, what strikes the visual mind so vividly are the images of flickering,, flashing light and colour:

fire, white moths, stars, flickering out, silver, fire aflame, glimmering, apple blossom, brightening, dappled, silver…moon, golden…sun,

the mirror of the fire going on in Yeats’ mind , reflected in the reader’s imagination.

Gérard Ducasse.

Ajit Narayanan · 5 May 2003

The first time that I heard of this poem was in a Ray Bradbury story called ‘The Golden Apples of the Sun’, in which the protagonist quotes the last two lines. I searched for and found the poem, and was awestruck by its almost fairy-tale beauty. It also fits into Bradbury’s story well – though at first sight the story has neither trouts nor beautiful girls, but rockets and the Sun instead. In fact, come to think of it, I think almost all of Bradbury’s works have the same Beauty that this poem has, and both Bradbury’s stories and this poem often remind me of each other.

AjitQ

Martha Lamb · 21 July 2003

This has always been one of my favorite poems–I remember reading it aloud in front of a class. It is even more powerful when read aloud. The images are all so vivid and perfect. Eudora Welty has a group of stories published together under the title of The golden Apples. They are all about a group of loosely connected people who live in a town in the Mississippi Delta and together form almost a novel. These are my favorite of her stories, and I find in them the same magical summery quality that is in the poem. Martha

ZWi4471215 · 25 July 2003

hi,
yes i would agree with your comments; a rather more suitable interpretation for moderm times. this poem is beautifyl it marks the begining of a love relationship, base on true romance,hope and a happy ending. i truly enjoded reading it.a peace of heaven wrap up in lyric form, and that no matter what we do as human eartlings, we will always be on the quest of what true Love really is! thanks1

ZWi4471215 · 25 July 2003

In your comments about this poem you have rising the of keep on hoping on the quest to true love!
That one day we will find it

Cordray Cole W Mr CMA-UMCD · 25 July 2003

When I first read this wonderful poem many years ago, I immediately flashed to my first wife who had died so very young - this poem speaks to me of eternal hope, love and the sure knowledge of an eternal existence somewhere, somehow.

This is a song of a man who has lost his only love to death, yet cannot accept that, and continues to search for her.

I know it well….

Cole W. Cordray, Lieutenant
Supervisor, Team 3

Patricia A. McKnight · 30 July 2003

I have not been able to enter a comment on Yeat’s “The Song of Wandering Aengus.” I shall try this way.

Aengus Og (or Angus or Oengus) is an Irish nature god (they had a variety) – one of the Tuatha de Danaan. In “The Crock O Gold” James Stephens describes him this way:
The god was slender and as swift as the wind. His hair swung about his face like golden blossoms. His eyes were mild and dancing and his lips smiled with quiet sweetness. About his head there flew perpetually a ring of singing birds, and when he spoke, his voice came sweetly from a center of sweetness…. where he has kissed a bird has flown, where he has trod a flower has sprung. Singing birds fly around his head at all times. In another legend he dreams a maiden – he calls her “Aeslinga” which means “dream maiden” – he comes to his mother and father and tells them that he is sick for this love and begs them to find her for him and betroth her to him. I have forgotten how this story ends, but it cannot be a happy ending.

aloha
owleyes

Linda Pierce · 26 August 2003

You are all correct. First heard in lyrics in song by Bud and Travis in the 60’s, never listened to Miss Collins, by design. Took a class on Jung and discovered Yeats. Most beautiful thing written in English language.

My take - it’s a man’s poem. Dennis Banks said (I paraphrase), “When the leather broke my flesh and I bled [Sundance ceremony], I KNEW that all women were my sisters.” Be man enough to bleed like us and you will find us.

The elusive feminine within a man, found only when becoming fully true to his man-ness. Jung’s Anima, the Sun God and Moon Goddess - ETERNAL.

The most beautiful thing - he KNOWS!

Susan Lawson WildCat Communications Inc · 2 December 2003

I read through to the end, hoping to find someone who elucidated the Jungian interpretation, which seems to fit perfectly with the original myth, that the maiden is inner woman found in every man. Jung called it the anima, for she is his soul-image, the yin to his yang. She seems to have her origin in the personal mother and forever influences how a man sees and interacts with the women in his life.

Susan C. Lawsonvoicecellfax

Patrick Mccully · 30 January 2004

Wandering Aengus Mac Og

While lying asleep one evening Angus was visited by a fair maiden of the Faery named Caer Ibormeith. So taken with her beauty was he that when she disappeared as he woke he could think of no other, the thought of being without her caused him to fall ill, in essence… Love Sick.

Angus enlisted the help of Bodb and together they managed to track her to a Loch where she was living with 149 other maidens each in the form of a swan. Each Swan Maiden was bound by a silver chain, which as in all good tales could only be released by true love.

To gain her love Angus transformed himself into a Swan upon which the chain that held his love broke in two therefore freeing her. Reunited with Caer Ibormeith the lovers flew around Loch Bel Dracon three times singing a song so sweet all who heard it fell asleep for three days.

Angus is known in Celtic Lore as a God of Love and with his Swan Maiden they are said to have returned to Bruig na Boinne, otherwise known as New Grange.

jwlenz · 15 February 2004

Donovan recorded a stunningly beautiful (verbatim) version of this poem on his album HMS Donovan in the early ’70s. That is where I first heard it. The imagery is magically powerful. I am reading it in a ceremony of men as an expression of the longing, seeking, questing that characterizes many of our lives. The final lines are, I think, a marvelous statement of what it is that we seek and need: the fruit of both realms–the direct and the reflected, the masculine and the feminine, the tangible and the spirit. Did I say? I LOVE this poem.
Joseph

Pat Ellis · 24 February 2004

I believe this as a dream of which love flows in wave that shows a loving man in a trance of love. Wishing to find his soul mate his true love appears. Vanishing from his sight he promises to find the woman of his dreams. To be such a man he will probably find her once more and fulfill his dream and become as one.

Andrea

FARBLUNJET · 6 March 2004

Sung most beautifully by Richie Havens on one of his “Mixed Bag” albums from the ’60s. By all means, try to listen to his version.

Linda Pierce · 6 March 2004

So many hollows and hills occur and again I find myself drawn to this song. I notice it is mostly titled The Song of Wandering Aengus. Just a story about this guy “Angus.” I had learned it as The Song of THE Wandering Aengus and told that AN Aengus was an old man. Can’t find my book of Yeats but I do see both titles in a search. If “the” was there, why is it almost always dropped?

Anyway, he was going in the right direction when the fire burned (up there in his head) - into the dark - his unconscious - his soul (down there). And something did arise. His response was to turn up the fire and to consume it, to have it. Of course It being his other half, it became illusive once more and said “keep trying.”

He does know that the golden apple will not consume the silver apple. He knows that he has grown old in the attempt to try again. He knows that it’s eternal.

I think what was missing was a teacher (who was Bodb?). There was no mid-wife present to TELL him to breath and pay attention through the bleeding and suffering.

Really LOOK and you will find your other half. And most importantly: “You can do this!” Be so willing that you also become a chained-up swan, then you will be released and whole.

Mrpurple004 · 19 April 2004

This poem is a love poem from Yeats to Maud Gonne, a woman that serves as his muse for many other works. He is referring to how he is always chasing her, but he will never catch her, and she will be just out of reach to him. The reference to the apples is to the first time that Yeats met Gonne, there is no mythological meaning to them, it is a personal memory of his.

Ruthlea McDonald · 24 April 2004

I love this poem , why does it make me cry?

DENEICY · 5 July 2004

Wandering Aengus

In “Wandering Aengus” Yeats visits that magical place of super-consciousness where earthly fish become fairies fairest, where everything is not only possible, but probable. We readers ache because we too long to transcend the boundaries of our human perception…or maybe we are remembering something lost?

Laurel Sanders · 28 July 2004

I am reminded of two pieces of literature. The first is The Da Vinci Code. The feminine/masculine symbolism in this poem has been clearly pointed out in previous comments, so I don’t need to go into it. My only addition is the added aspect of this whole poem fitting very well into the Grail Quest, and with that system of explanation the apples gain another meaning. The second is Big Fish. I admit I have not read the book, only seen the movie. It seems that the story is an extended rendering of this poem; the poem itself provides more insight into interpreting the story than the other way around.
-L.

Steve Kowarsky · 26 September 2004

I read this poem this morning with my wife. Although it has been one of our favorites for 40 years, I felt I understood it for the first time. I had always wondered about the apples - what do they really symbolize. Today I realized that they symbolize life itself: the nights and days of our lives. The silver apples are our nights. The golden apples our days. The speaker imagines that when he finally does find and kiss his true love, he will live happily, “plucking” each night and each day, for the rest of his life. I think there are many overtones suggested by these images, but I now believe this is the plain root meaning of the lines.

Gerald Grow · 10 December 2004

I am fortunate to have saved the 1962 LP of Cyril Cusack reading this poem, and others by Yeats. Cusack, who worked with Yeats, is magnificent.

Throughout his poetry, Yeats works with the inescapable polarities that define the arena of our lives. One of those is the gap created by our ability to imagine perfection, to dream and see visions, to step into a world of archetypes and images, to imagine a life better than we know – and the ordinariness of the preoccupations of everyday life.

We suffer when that imagined perfection makes the ordinary seem desolate. We also suffer when the ordinary displaces our dreams. Each negates the other; it is our task to make each support the other. And it is a task we can never finish.

There is no escape from wandering between the “floor” we “stoop to” and the Golden and Silver Apples. To take either alternative exclusively is a form of death in life – the cold purity of the monk or the underwater-swimming busyness of the theater manager.

In Among School Children, this frenzy takes the form of a girl putting on “burdensome beauty,” to be haunted thereafter by the addictive perfection men see in her, and that, indeed, takes her over – for a while.

The Wild Old Wicked Man repudiates the quest for perfection, enthusiastically embracing the contradictions of our nature. But does he resolve the oppositions? I think they are with us always, and we can be torn by their opposing pulls or kind to ourselves and others. We do not escape them; they are created by the nature of our mind.

Comedy handles these oppositions best, by honoring their unresolvable inevitability, yet showing us how to feel our dilemmas deeply, laugh at ourselves, and go on living. Don Quixote. Twelfth Night. Chaplin’s City Lights.

–Gerald

Tonyhume · 20 February 2005

i have just discovered the donovan rendering of “the song of wandering aengus”
it is very beautiful, very very beautiful. he phrases those astonishing lines with
sensitivity and power and takes me in my mind to an early dawn morning where it is I that threads the berry to catch the little silver trout.

regards
t

Tonyhume · 20 February 2005

this poem is the earth, the air. it is fire, it is water. it is moon and sun. it is you and I
and it is love. (and i wish I had written it)

t

Erin M. Taylor · 13 April 2005

Also known as “Angus the young”, he was considered the Irish god of love. He was a young handsome god that had four birds flying about his head – some say they symbolize kisses – who inspired love in all who heard them. He was the son of Dagda and Boann (‘the wife of Elcmar’).

Once, Aengus was troubled by the dream of a young maiden, He instantly fell in love with her and became love sick. He told his mother Boann and she searched the whole of Ireland for the maiden, but after a year she still had not found the maiden. Then Dagda was called and he searched Ireland for a year, and still did not find the maiden. Finally Bov the Red, king of the Dananns in Munster and Dagda’s aide, was called to search and after a year he found the maiden.

Aengus was taken to the lake of the Dragon’s Mouth, and there he saw 150 maidens all chained with gold into pairs. He spied her at once and her name was Caer, the daughter of Ethal and Anubal, a prince of the Dananns of Connact. On November first she and all the other maidens are transformed into swans for a year. He was told if he could identify her as a swan he could marry her. On November 1 Aengus went out to the lake and called to his love, and once he had found her he then turned in to a swan himself and joined her. They flew off together singing such a beautiful song that all who heard them fell asleep for three days and nights.

Aengus had a son called, “Diarmuid Ua Duibhne” or Diarmuid of the Love Spot. One night while hunting Diarmuid met a maiden who made a magic love spot appear on his head, and from then on no woman ever looked upon him with out falling in love with him.

Susan Parker · 6 June 2005

I only have “beautiful” written by this poem in an old college textbook. No other notes. For me, this morning, I like to think of that little silver trout become glimmering girl with apple blossom in her hair as a part of oneself that one is handed. On your way to one place, you are directed to another. Some part of yourself calls your name, and what you thought was your prize was really just a prologue to a life-changing event. The real prize. A prize that you will never let go of, even though it is elusive.

I love Yeats use of apples. Apple blossoms in her hair leading to “I will . pluck till time and times are done/ The silver apples of the moon,/ The golden apples of the sun.”

All this “because a fire was in my head.”

I was right all those years ago: it’s a beautiful poem.

Susan

Sean V Baker · 14 May 2006

This may help, from Yeats’ himself, from his preface to Lady Gregory’s “Gods and Fighting Men”:

---

Old writers had an admirable symbolism that attributed certain energies to the influence of the sun, and certain others to the lunar influence. To lunar influence belong all thoughts and emotions that were created by the community, by the common people, by nobody knows who, and to the sun all that came from the high disciplined or individual kingly mind. I myself imagine a marriage of the sun and moon in the arts I take most pleasure in; and now bride and bridegroom but exchange, as it were, full cups of gold and silver, and now they are one in a mystical embrace. From the moon come the folk-songs imagined by reapers and spinners out of the common impulse of their labour, and made not by putting words together, but by mixing verses and phrases, and the folk-tales made by the capricious mixing of incidents known to everybody in new ways, as we deal out cards, never getting the same hand twice over. When we hear some fine story, we never know whether it has not been hazard that put the last touch of adventure. Such poetry, as it seems to me, desires an infinity of wonder or emotion, for where there is no individual mind there is no measurer-out, no marker-in of limits. The poor fisher has no possession of the world and no responsibility for it; and if he dreams of a love-gift better than the brown shawl that seems too common for poetry, why should he not dream of a glove made from the skin of a bird, or shoes made from the skin of a fish, or a coat made from the glittering garment of the salmon? Was it not Aeschylus who said he but served up dishes from the banquet of Homer?–but Homer himself found the great banquet on an earthen floor and under a broken roof. We do not know who at the foundation of the world made the banquet for the first time, or who put the pack of cards into rough hands; but we do know that, unless those that have made many inventions are about to change the nature of poetry, we may have to go where Homer went if we are to sing a new song. Is it because all that is under the moon thirsts to escape out of bounds, to lose itself in some unbounded tidal stream, that the songs of the folk are mournful, and that the story of the Fianna, whenever the queens lament for their lovers, reminds us of Songs that are still sung in country places? Their grief, even when it is to be brief like Grania’s, goes up into the waste places of the sky. But in supreme art or in supreme life there is the influence of the sun too, and the sun brings with it, as old writers tell us, not merely discipline but joy; for its discipline is not of the kind the multitudes impose upon us by their weight and pressure, but the expression of the individual soul turning itself into a pure fire and imposing its own pattern, its own music, upon the heaviness and the dumbness that is in others and in itself. When we have drunk the cold cup of the moon’s intoxication, we thirst for something beyond ourselves, and the mind flows outward to a natural immensity; but if we have drunk from the hot cup of the sun, our own fullness awakens, we desire little, for wherever we go our heart goes too; and if any ask what music is the sweetest, we can but answer, as Finn answered, ‘what happens’. And yet the songs and stories that have come from either influence are a part, neither less than the other, of the pleasure that is the bride-bed of poetry.

-W.B.Yeats

Jim Turner · 17 May 2006

Ten years ago I remember hearing the songs of Robert James Waller singing the songs on his album “The Bridges of Madison County” and hearing him recite the poem of Yeats. It caused me to read the works of Yeats and read this poem in particular. I’ve read the comments of everyone on this site. So much truth in what everyone says about the poem. The poem in fact has the ability to please many a mind. I live in Tennessee and have actually met old timers who’ve been a little intoxicated and talked about cutting and peeling a hazel stick and using it to do magic things. Isn’t there a type of mermaid quality of the trout too? The “glimmering girl” transformation and the vow to pursue that “dream” after she has magically faded through the brightening air combines magic, romance/sex, journeying and aspiration; the wonderful imagery, musical sounds of the syllables that reflect the image itself; the transfixing of the old spiriting man and the “glimmering girl”-I never tire of hearing or reciting the words-there is always something inexplicable and that’s why it’s so good-fascinating, always something else outside it….

Baker Sean · 6 September 2006

Let Yeats help in his own words, from Yeats’ Preface to Lady Gregory’s “Gods and Fighting Men”:

Old writers had an admirable symbolism that attributed certain energies to the influence of the sun, and certain others to the lunar influence. To lunar influence belong all thoughts and emotions that were created by the community, by the common people, by nobody knows who, and to the sun all that came from the high disciplined or individual kingly mind. I myself imagine a marriage of the sun and moon in the arts I take most pleasure in; and now bride and bridegroom but exchange, as it were, full cups of gold and silver, and now they are one in a mystical embrace.

…

When we have drunk the cold cup of the moon’s intoxication, we thirst for something beyond ourselves, and the mind flows outward to a natural immensity; but if we have drunk from the hot cup of the sun, our own fullness awakens, we desire little, for wherever we go our heart goes too; and if any ask what music is the sweetest, we can but answer, as Finn answered, ‘what happens’. And yet the songs and stories that have come from either influence are a part, neither less than the other, of the pleasure that is the bride-bed of poetry.

[broken link] http://www.duinocastle.com/library/yeats/gods_and_fighting_men_preface.asp <[broken link] http://www.duinocastle.com/library/yeats/gods_and_fighting_men_preface.asp>

-Sean
[broken link] http://www.duinocastle.com/library/index.asp <[broken link] http://www.duinocastle.com/library/index.asp>

williamclloyd · 11 October 2006

I wish only to add what is not already here – that Ms. Jean Redpath, of Scotland, recorded a very beautiful sung version of this exquisite poem on her album, “A Fine Song for Singing” [Philo CD PH-1110], and that all of the other poems sung on that album are beautiful as well, and haunting as well, especially in her gorgeous rich alto voice.

- Bill Lloyd

Sam Clanton · 15 November 2006

Nothing I could add is comparable to the quality of this piece.

James McFarlane · 6 December 2006

One of the comments above suggests that Yeats was thinking of Maud Gonne when he wrote this poem, which reminds me that some asked her (Maud) why she had refused to marry Yeats and make him happy, to which she replied that if she had, he would never have written what he did; that from his un-happiness, his unfulfilled longing, had come all his greatest work. A very perceptive chiel.

Mardon1788 · 11 January 2007

This is an excellent poem. And perhaps a source for the song ‘A Forest’ by The Cure. The lyrics seem to tell a remarkably similar story to the poem. The lyrics are below:

Come closer and see
See into the trees
Find the girl
While you can
Come closer and see
See into the dark
Just follow your eyes
Just follow your eyes

I hear her voice
Calling my name
The sound is deep
In the dark
I hear her voice
And start to run
Into the trees
Into the trees

Into the trees

Suddenly I stop
But I know it’s too late
I’m lost in a forest
All alone
The girl was never there
It’s always the same
I’m running towards nothing
Again and again and again

Waldo Daniel R. (CMS/ORDI) · 4 April 2007

By the way, Morton Subotnik wrote a piece titled Silver Apples of the Moon back in 1967 … one of the earliest synthesized works, I believe, and certainly as haunting as Yeat’s poem.

Tom King · 16 March 2008

I have the distinct pleasure to present the poem in song in a few days. Wanting to hear some other ideas, I read this column of kenners of the poem. I am old and relate to the last stanza well. I also think of the Faust legend - constant striving, not the attaining, is the key to life. Perhaps Aengus’ striving is the key, whether he “attains” the girl or not. I also think of the poem set by Schubert of Die Forelle. Again, man is trying to trick the trout, the elusive trout. Only by deception is he successful.
TRK