There\u2019s a delightful quickness of fantasy in early Yeats. When I was a boy, critics seemed to enjoy disparaging his \u2018Celtic twilight\u2019 poems as \u2013 I suppose \u2013 trivial and escapist. I don\u2019t know if that\u2019s still the case. Carrying Jeffares\u2019 MacMillan paperback selection around with me, I loved intoning those early poems quite as much as the later ones and for the same reason \u2013 I gorged on the sheer richness and control of their music in a quite indiscriminate way. Nowadays the solemn drone of the Rose poems has lost its appeal for me. I don\u2019t mean I now think of it as weak, or bad, or clumsy but that there\u2019s something static and unchanging in its effect which means that it has lost its life through repetition. \u2018The Song of Wandering Aengus\u2019 and similar poems have kept their freshness. I think this is partly because of the sparkling distinctness of their images. Each line brings a separate self-contained flowering of life as well as contributing to a developing narrative:<\/p>\n
I went out to the hazel wood,
\nBecause a fire was in my head,
\nAnd cut and peeled a hazel wand,
\nAnd hooked a berry to a thread;
\nAnd when white moths were on the wing,
\nAnd moth-like stars were flickering out,
\nI dropped the berry in a stream
\nAnd caught a little silver trout.<\/p>\n
The style of almost childlike simplicity is important. Aengus says things and we seem to see them with absolute clarity in a mood of wide-eyed, wondering but unquestioning acceptance. There\u2019s no pushing of mood or meaning by the poet, and this is part of the difference from the Rose poems, and why this one seems to me so much more artistically resilient than they are. However, I think that there\u2019s something entranced and entrancing about the feeling of the verse right from the start, before the trout transforms to a glimmering girl. What I started this piece hoping to do was to analyse how this feeling is given but that seems to be beyond me. All I can say is that the way we and the speaker are caught in the grid of these delicate iambic tetrameter lines with their abcb rhymes seems to have something to do with it, creating a sense of being in some sort of hyperreal, entranced state or space. To refine this point, it seems to have something to do with the way the lines seem to teem with life at the same time as being parcelled out into small, almost symmetrical units. There are four feet to a line and each line seems to divide into two halves each having two stresses. This is true even of the most asymmetrical line, the first, where the second foot is reversed and where the syntactical and therefore rhythmic division comes after just three syllables. Though the poem is printed as three stanzas of eight lines, each stanza subdivides into two rhyming quatrains that are also units of sense (in the case of the third stanza the semicolon instructs us to read them in that way, though the words present the possibility of a continuous flow). These symmetrical divisions seem to me to create an impression of trance or enchanted suspension, but it coexists with a sense of swarmingly pervasive life that comes partly from the minute particularity of observation and statement and partly from the sheer delicate vitality with which the poem\u2019s metre, sounds and patterns of intonation move. You see this everywhere but I specially want to point to the way \u2018fire\u2019 in line two surprises us with its intensity of emphasis in both meaning and sound.<\/p>\n
Enough comment! Here\u2019s the whole poem to delight in:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Song of Wandering Aengus<\/strong><\/p>\n I went out to the hazel wood, When I had laid it on the floor Though I am old with wandering \n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There\u2019s a delightful quickness of fantasy in early Yeats. When I was a boy, critics seemed to enjoy disparaging his \u2018Celtic twilight\u2019 poems as \u2013 I suppose \u2013 trivial and escapist. I don\u2019t know if that\u2019s still the case. Carrying Jeffares\u2019 MacMillan paperback selection around with me, I loved intoning those early poems quite as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2826","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-w-b-yeats"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2826"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2826"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2826\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2829,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2826\/revisions\/2829"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nBecause a fire was in my head,
\nAnd cut and peeled a hazel wand,
\nAnd hooked a berry to a thread;
\nAnd when white moths were on the wing,
\nAnd moth-like stars were flickering out,
\nI dropped the berry in a stream
\nAnd caught a little silver trout.<\/p>\n
\nI went to blow the fire a-flame,
\nBut something rustled on the floor,
\nAnd someone called me by my name:
\nIt had become a glimmering girl
\nWith apple blossom in her hair
\nWho called me by my name and ran
\nAnd faded through the brightening air.<\/p>\n
\nThrough hollow lands and hilly lands,
\nI will find out where she has gone,
\nAnd kiss her lips and take her hands;
\nAnd walk among long dappled grass,
\nAnd pluck till time and times are done,
\nThe silver apples of the moon,
\nThe golden apples of the sun.<\/p>\n