The song of wandering Aengus.  by WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS.

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
And went to blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled on the floor
And someone called me by my name.

It had become a glimmering girl,
With apple blossoms in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran,
And faded in 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 til time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

Comments by Ira Maine, Poetry Editor
Here is Yeats, up to his armpits in Celtic Mythology. Yeats, a young product of that late 19th century Romanticism which included Beardsley and Moore and Wilde, the Cafe Royal aesthetes and the rediscovery of that same mythology as a vehicle for artistic expression.

Sometimes we have “peak experiences’.  Split seconds of astonishing clarity where everything there is to know is known to you and where you need absolutely nothing more to feel complete.  Unfortunately these blinding revelations are gone just as quickly and we long desperately to experience them again, to be reminded of that mind-blowing ‘Otherworld’.  Perhaps for Yeats the girl, the fish represent that ‘peak experience’ and Aengus (Yeats) spends his life trying to recapture it.

Aengus is the Celtic Eros, the god of love, eternally young and handsome and is the possessor of a harp whose music no one can resist.  Though Yeats is the central figure in the poem, in pursuit of the unattainable, the peak experience perhaps, he is, at the same time, Aengus, the god of love, forever moving and restless, because, for life to have meaning, love is paramount and seeks continually to recreate itself.

It’s not all about making the two backed beast, you know…
IRA MAINE, Poetry Editor.