May Flowers

Lane Core has some beautiful flower pictures up, and May poetry as well. And here's an apple blossom poem, to go along with the apple blossoms in my backyard. It's one of my favorites. My children all learned it by heart while they were still quite small, and my parents have a framed copy on their living room wall.

Why do we all like it so much?

Because it's beautiful.

The Song of Wandering Aengus

I went out to the hazel woods,
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 the stream,
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And some one 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 til time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

--by William Butler Yeats, 1897

Yeats was very fond of Celtic myths. Aengus was the Irish god of love, and--so the legend goes--saw a girl in a dream, fell in love with her, searched for her, and finally did find her.

Yeats' poem, however, isn't just a retelling of a lovely old legend. Notice that it doesn't tell the end of the story. It exists in that weary, determined, anticipatory time between the mysterious calling and the finding--the time in which many of us live.

It was the time, the mindset, in which Yeats lived. "Yeats himself, religious by temperament but unable to believe in Christian orthodoxy, sought all his life for traditions of esoteric thought that would compensate for a lost religion"--so say the editors of the Norton Anthology of English Literature. All his life, Yeats was searching for what he had lost.

So what was he looking for, in the guise of Aengus? What had he glimpsed, and lost, and longed to find again?

Perhaps it was the One who calls us each by name, who knows even our secret names.

Perhaps it was the Muse, words well spoken--"apples of gold," as the writer of Proverbs calls them, "in settings of silver."

Or perhaps it was simply a girl--Maud Gonne, whom he loved and lost, and whose complexion "was luminous, like that of apple-blossom through which the light falls."

Most likely, it was all three.