The Song of Wandering Aengus by W. B. Yeats
Quick answer: The Song of Wandering Aengus by W. B. Yeats analysed: the silver trout, the glimmering girl, the poem's ballad craft, and why the final apples never fade.
A man goes fishing at dawn because a fire is burning in his head. He catches a silver trout, lays it on the floor, and when he turns to blow the fire aflame, the fish has become a glimmering girl with apple blossom in her hair, who calls him by name and vanishes. He spends the rest of his life looking for her. That is the whole story of The Song of Wandering Aengus, published in The Wind Among the Reeds in 1899, and it is one of the most purely enchanted poems in the language.
Aengus is the old Irish god of love, youth and poetry, who in myth pined for a maiden seen in a dream. Yeats pours that legend into three stanzas of ballad-simple verse and ends on two lines about the moon's silver apples and the sun's golden ones that readers tend to carry for life.
What the poem says
Stanza one is the catch. Driven out to the hazel wood by the fire in his head, the speaker cuts a hazel wand, hooks a berry to a thread, and when white moths are on the wing fishes a little silver trout out of the stream. Every detail is folk-magical: hazel is the tree of wisdom in Irish lore, and the hour is the moth-lit threshold between night and day.
Stanza two is the transformation. Something rustles on the floor, someone calls him by his name: the trout has become a glimmering girl with apple blossom in her hair, who names him and fades through the brightening air. Stanza three is the rest of his life. Though he is old with wandering through hollow and hilly lands, he will find where she has gone, kiss her lips, take her hands, and walk among long dappled grass, plucking till time and times are done the silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun.
How it works
The form is a folk song refined: three eight-line stanzas of iambic tetrameter, rhyming on the even lines, with Yeats's early-period music of long vowels and soft consonants. Nothing in the diction would puzzle a child, which is deliberate; the poem wants the authority of something sung for centuries.
Two craft decisions carry the magic. First, the transformation happens off-stage, while the speaker's back is turned; he hears the rustle and the voice before he sees the girl, and the reader's imagination does the metamorphosis. Second, the tense change: stanzas one and two are past tense, but stanza three swings into future, 'I will find out where she has gone', so the poem ends not in loss but in resolve. The closing pair of images balances moon against sun, silver against gold, one line each, a symmetry that clicks shut like a spell completed.
Why it lasts
The poem distils the oldest story there is, the vision glimpsed once and pursued forever, into a shape small enough to memorise. Readers disagree about its mood, and the disagreement keeps it alive: is this a tragedy of wasted life, or a triumph of faith in the marvellous? The old man's certainty can be read as delusion or as devotion.
It also marks Yeats at the height of his Celtic Twilight manner, folklore, symbol and personal longing fused, and its afterlife is unusually musical: it has been set and sung by dozens of artists, because it was built like a song to begin with.
What today's poet can steal
Steal the off-stage transformation. When the impossible thing happens, look away; let sound or touch report it. Wonder survives peripheral vision far better than direct description.
Steal the tense pivot. Two stanzas of past, one of future, and no present tense at all: the gap where the present should be is where the whole aching life of searching lives. Structure can imply what you never state.
What poets can take from this
- Let magical events happen while the speaker's back is turned, reported by sound.
- Shift from past to future tense at the final stanza and omit the present entirely.
- Ground enchantment in tool-level detail: the wand, the thread, the berry, the hour.
- End on paired images in symmetrical lines to close a poem like a spell.
- Borrow a figure from myth or folklore and give it your own hunger.
Try it yourself
Write a three-stanza poem in which something you caught, bought or found transforms while you are not looking, calls you by name, and disappears. Spend the final stanza in future tense, describing the search you have not finished.
Questions
What is The Song of Wandering Aengus about?
A man catches a silver trout that becomes a glimmering girl who calls his name and vanishes; he spends his life seeking her. It dramatises lifelong pursuit of a vision, blending Irish myth, since Aengus is the god of love and youth, with personal longing.
What do the silver and golden apples symbolise?
The closing images of the moon's silver apples and the sun's golden apples suggest a paradise where time is harvested like fruit, night and day plucked together. They stand for the completed union the speaker still expects to enjoy till time ends.
What form is the poem written in?
Three eight-line stanzas of iambic tetrameter with rhymes on the even lines, in deliberately simple ballad-like diction. Its songlike build is why so many musicians have set it to music.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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