Continuing the Sun’s week-long celebration of William Butler Yeats for the one hundred fifty-seventh anniversary of his birth, today’s Poem of the Day has been, in the century or so of its existence, much anthologized, often recited and read aloud, frequently sung. An enduring and sentimental favorite, in the vein of the young Yeats who assumed like a mantle the bardic wisdom of venerable old age, “The Song of Wandering Aengus” feels like a poem that has never not been written, never not recited, never not rendered in song. It feels, and is meant to feel, like a cultural artifact far older than it is. Yeats himself claimed Greek folksong as his inspiration, claiming that the “folk belief” of the Greeks resembled that of the Irish. The title identifies the poem’s speaker as an Irish god, who according to legend fell in love with a woman whom he saw only in dreams. In three tetrameter octets, “The Song of Wandering Aengus” recounts this legend as a reversal of the Cupid and Psyche myth, or of the Norse tale we know as East of the Sun and West of the Moon, its protagonist’s life consumed by the quest for a vanished love.

The Song of Wandering Aengus 
by William Butler 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.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.