William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
This work is inspired by and based on the legend of the Gaelic love god Aengus. In the legend, Aengus stirs out of his sleep one night due to a vision of an amazingly beautiful woman. He grows obsessed by her beauty and takes off in wandering, hungering for her love. He discovers her at a lake where...
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.
The theme in my view is that one can go their whole life without losing motivation, curiosity, and desire to search. Notice in the first two stanzas there’s a mention of fire: the motivation for the speaker creating a fishing rod from a wand, string, and berry is that there is"a fire in [his/her] he...