Malcolm Guite on Yeats' poem “Song of the Wandering Aengus”:
“I first read this poem as a young man, w[a]ndering around Ireland myself at the age of 19 on a full-blown romantic quest for truth and beauty that did not then find its fulfilment. I reread it now in middle age and each time I do it reconnects me with that first glimmering vision and questing heart of my youth, which has since begun to find its fulfilment in the beauty of the gospel, but still quests and yearns. For every Christian there is both a first vision and an unfulfilled ‘not yet’, and we must all say, in the words of another Irishman also indebted to Yeats, ‘I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.”
(From Word in the Wilderness.)
“The Song of Wandering Aengus"
W. B. 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
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.
Waldron Landing
Falling Creek
Suwannee River
