The Song of Wandering Aengus

“The Song of Wandering Aengus

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 were 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.

- W. B. Yeats



It is usually sung to a traditional tune, though another melody has been written for it by Donovan. The original tune is a little strange in that it doesn't resolve.

Through the years, it has been recorded by Burl Ives, Bud & Travis, and Judy Collins, to name a few, under the title "The Golden Apples Of The Sun".”

“I have read that there is much mythology and some esotericism behind the symbols of this poem. Have you knowledge of that?”

“So, somebody else watches Enterprise, too?”

“This calls for More Research! I came to it originally through music instead of literature, being raised by Bartenders and Folk Musicians like I was... <VBG>

experimental link to midi file”

“uh oh... BUSTED, LOL”

“Of course, it is a great poem at face value. I just remember reading about the "meaning behing the poem" at one time. It must not have impressed me enough to make me remember.”

“It was too much of a coincidence, Tilt....

...although I have had stuff like that happen before.”

“Two things, basically. Yeats was writing froman Arcadian perspective this is romantic pastoralism (idealised country life), also there is the Celtic belief in the relationship between humans and the natural world. This does not mean fairies and elves only, but also the belief (rather nice, I think) that when we die our souls enter the natural world, trees, rocks streams etc. (viz. The Mabinogion - the original Arthurian legend where the sacred and profane perils found in the latter originated in the Celtic tradition - springs and grottoes etc.)

Yeats's romantic tradition is linked to this and the romantic ideals of 'Truth' and 'True' love (with caps). We can see this treated later in RobertFrost's poem 'Paul's Wife' - I recommend it highly.

Also, Aengus was the Celtic god of beauty and poetry, often compared to Appollo. Does that help?

Doug.”

“Sorry:

Thus the women in the two poems are 'Pure' (notice the caps again - very Romantic) because they are from nature and not our corrupt society and we can love them truly and purely. Unfortunately,they tend to disappear in a huff when their human lover does something stupid and - well - human. Wait a minute here, am I talking about myself? Hmmm.”

“In fact, the Celts believed that if you recignised the voice of someone in the sound of the stream (which sometimes does sound like voices - viz. 'babbling brook'), or in the rustling of leaves, that person would re-appear. This is the origin of many of the knights with mystical and magical powers who challenged King Arthur's knights in their search for the Holy Grail in Arthurian legend -which was Christianised by Christien de Troyes and Geoffrey of Monmouth, Bretons brought over with William the Conqueror who could understand the Welsh writings (barely). Thus the quest of wandering kings and warriors became the search for the Grail which had been brought from Jerusalem to England by Joseph of Arimathea.”

“Thanks! I enjoyed that.

If I recall corectly, wasn't Merlin supposed to be fond of caves and especially grottoes for their mystical powers?”

“Thanks for that, Gremlin.
I also think there is sybolism in the fish in that it comes from under water, (the subconscious), and represents an awakening or a kind of enlightenment.”

“The Return of the Wandering Aengus --

(Either click on the link below, or reset the date range to 'All')

http://www.thebackpacker.com/trailtalk/thread/13459,-1.php




Paul's Wife by Robert Frost

To drive Paul out of any lumber camp
All that was needed was to say to him,
"How is the wife, Paul?"--and he'd disappear.
Some said it was because he had no wife,
And hated to be twitted on the subject;
Others because he'd come within a day
Or so of having one, and then been Jilted;
Others because he'd had one once, a good one,
Who'd run away with someone else and left him;
And others still because he had one now
He only had to be reminded of--
He was all duty to her in a minute:
He had to run right off to look her up,
As if to say, "That's so, how is my wife?
I hope she isn't getting into mischief."
No one was anxious to get rid of Paul.
He'd been the hero of the mountain camps
Ever since, just to show them, he had slipped
The bark of a whole tamarack off whole
As clean as boys do off a willow twig
To make a willow whistle on a Sunday
April by subsiding meadow brooks.
They seemed to ask him just to see him go,
"How is the wife, Paul?" and he always went.
He never stopped to murder anyone
Who asked the question. He just disappeared--
Nobody knew in what direction,
Although it wasn't usually long
Before they beard of him in some new camp,
The same Paul at the same old feats of logging.
The question everywhere was why should Paul
Object to being asked a civil question--
A man you could say almost anything to
Short of a fighting word. You have the answers.
And there was one more not so fair to Paul:
That Paul had married a wife not his equal.
Paul was ashamed of her. To match a hero
She would have had to be a heroine;
Instead of which she was some half-breed squaw.
But if the story Murphy told was true,
She wasn't anything to be ashamed of.

You know Paul could do wonders. Everyone's
Heard how he thrashed the horses on a load
That wouldn't budge, until they simply stretched
Their rawhide harness from the load to camp.
Paul told the boss the load would be all right,
"The sun will bring your load in"--and it did--
By shrinking the rawhide to natural length.
That's what is called a stretcher. But I guess
The one about his jumping so's to land
With both his feet at once against the ceiling,
And then land safely right side up again,
Back on the floor, is fact or pretty near fact.
Well, this is such a yarn. Paul sawed his wife
Out of a white-pine log. Murphy was there
And, as you might say, saw the lady born.
Paul worked at anything in lumbering.
He'd been hard at it taking boards away
For--I forget--the last ambitious sawyer
To want to find out if he couldn't pile
The lumber on Paul 'til Paul begged for mercy.
They'd sliced the first slab off a big butt log,
And the sawyer had slammed the carriage back
To slam end-on again against the saw teeth.
To judge them by the way they caught themselves
When they saw what had happened to the log,
They must have had a guilty expectation
Something was going to go with their slambanging.
Something had left a broad black streak of grease
On the new wood the whole length of the log
Except, perhaps, a foot at either end.
But when Paul put his finger in the grease,
It wasn't grease at all, but a long slot.
The log was hollow. They were sawing pine.
"First time I ever saw a hollow pine.
That comes of having Paul around the place.
Take it to bell for me," the sawyer said.
Everyone had to have a look at it
And tell Paul what he ought to do about it.
(They treated it as his.) "You take a jackknife,
And spread the opening, and you've got a dugout
All dug to go a-fishing in." To Paul
The hollow looked too sound and clean and empty
Ever to have housed birds or beasts or bees.
There was no entrance for them to get in by.
It looked to him like some new kind of hollow
He thought he'd better take his jackknife to.
So after work that evening be came back
And let enough light into it by cutting
To see if it was empty. He made out in there
A slender length of pith, or was it pith?
It might have been the skin a snake had cast
And left stood up on end inside the tree
The hundred years the tree must have been growing.
More cutting and he bad this in both hands,
And looking from it to the pond nearby,
Paul wondered how it would respond to water.
Not a breeze stirred, but just the breath of air
He made in walking slowly to the beach
Blew it once off his hands and almost broke it.
He laid it at the edge, where it could drink.
At the first drink it rustled and grew limp.
At the next drink it grew invisible.
Paul dragged the shallows for it with his fingers,
And thought it must have melted. It was gone.
And then beyond the open water, dim with midges,
Where the log drive lay pressed against the boom,
It slowly rose a person, rose a girl,
Her wet hair heavy on her like a helmet,
Who, leaning on a log, looked back at Paul.
And that made Paul in turn look back
To see if it was anyone behind him
That she was looking at instead of him.
(Murphy had been there watching all the time,
But from a shed where neither of them could see him.)
There was a moment of suspense in birth
When the girl seemed too waterlogged to live,
Before she caught her first breath with a gasp
And laughed. Then she climbed slowly to her feet,
And walked off, talking to herself or Paul,
Across the logs like backs of alligators,
Paul taking after her around the pond.

Next evening Murphy and some other fellows
Got drunk, and tracked the pair up Catamount,
From the bare top of which there is a view
To other hills across a kettle valley.
And there, well after dark, let Murphy tell it,
They saw Paul and his creature keeping house.
It was the only glimpse that anyone
Has had of Paul and her since Murphy saw them
Falling in love across the twilight millpond.
More than a mile across the wilderness
They sat together halfway up a cliff
In a small niche let into it, the girl
Brightly, as if a star played on the place,
Paul darkly, like her shadow. All the light
Was from the girl herself, though, not from a star,
As was apparent from what happened next.
All those great ruffians put their throats together,
And let out a loud yell, and threw a bottle,
As a brute tribute of respect to beauty.
Of course the bottle fell short by a mile,
But the shout reached the girl and put her light out.
She went out like a firefly, and that was all.

So there were witnesses that Paul was married
And not to anyone to be ashamed of
Everyone had been wrong in judging Paul.
Murphy told me Paul put on all those airs
About his wife to keep her to himself.
Paul was what's called a terrible possessor.
Owning a wife with him meant owning her.
She wasn't anybody else's business,
Either to praise her or much as name her,
And he'd thank people not to think of her.
Murphy's idea was that a man like Paul
Wouldn't be spoken to about a wife
In any way the world knew how to speak.

”