"The Song of Wandering Aengus" is a poem by Irish poet W. B. Yeats. It was first printed in 1897 in British magazine The Sketch under the title "A Mad Song."[1] It was then published under its standard name in Yeats' 1899 anthology The Wind Among the Reeds.[1] It is especially remembered for its two final lines: "The silver apples of the moon,/ The golden apples of the sun."
The poem is told from the point of view of an old man who, at some point in his past, had a fantastical experience in which a silver trout he had caught and laid on the floor turned into a "glimmering girl" who called him by his name, then vanished; he became infatuated with her, and remains devoted to finding her again.[1]
In an 1899 letter to fellow poet Dora Sigerson, Yeats called "The Song of Wandering Aengus" "the kind of poem I like best myself—a ballad that gradually lifts ... from circumstantial to purely lyrical writing."[2]