The song of Wandering Aengus

William Butler Yeats was a young Irish poet who was born on 13 June 1865 in Sandymount County Dublin and who died on 28 January 1939 in France. He came from a wealthy family belonging to the protestant Anglo-Irish minority, that had controlled most of Ireland since the end of the 17th century. His father, John Butler Yeats was a famous Irish painter. W.B. Yeats was therefore interested in the arts and in theater created then the Abbey Theatre with the help of Lady Gregory. He is known to be one of the greatest poets of the 20th century and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. Moreover, during all his literary life he was deeply involved in politics and had a complicated love life. He indeed chased after Maud Gonne for a long time but withouth success. She was famous for her revolutionary side, her nationalism and her beauty. Maud Gonne remained a really “powerful figure” and a main part of the inspiration he needed for his poetry. He finally married Georgie Hyde-Lees, with whom he had 2 children. His life as a poet began in 1885 when he first started writing. His inspiration came from his childhood, when he spent his holidays in County Sligo and studied poetry becoming increasingly fascinated by Irish legends and the occult. His writing is therefore strongly influenced by Celtic mythology and Renaissance, often using “mystical, slow-placed and lyrical” references in most of his poems.

One of Yeat’s well known poem is called “The Song of Wandering Aengus”. Even if Yeats had studied Irish folklore and knew almost all of its myths, the poem does not deal with a particular myth. It borrows some ideas from “The Dream of Aengus Óg” but it is more about searching for love and beauty than about the myth of Aengus, the Celtic god of love and beauty, itself. The poem tells us about how Aengus fell in love with a woman he had dreamed about and how he spent his whole life looking for her. Different themes are discussed in the poem such as love, one of Yeat’s usual theme, with a man searching all his life for the perfect love, as Yeats ran after Maud Gonne for most of his life. Celtic mythology is also exploited, since it really interested Yeats. The last two themes are the incapacity of having everything we desire, and the fact of growing old. Yeats beautifully managed to explore all these different themes in a short, 24-line poem, therefore proving that he was indeed one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. The pom was written on 31th January in the late 1890s. At the time its title was “A Mad Song” and it was first printed in 1897. The title that we know best today was used when the poem was included in the collection “The Wind Among the Reeds” which appeared in 1899. This collection of poems really shows how Yeats was passionate about and involved in Celtic mythology and Irish folklore, which were the real groundwork of his life and especially of his career. “The Song Of Wandering Aengus’’ was voted Ireland’s fourth most popular poem by the readers of the Irish Times.

Estelle Collart, Nina Demoustier, (Duncan Wasieczkco)