Get out the microscope, because we’re going through this poem line-by-line.
Lines 1-2
I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
- Let's take it from the top, gang. The poem begins with the word "I," which means that a first-person narrator, Aengus, is at the center of the action.
- He tells us that he went out to a "hazel wood"—a wood with trees that produce all of those hazelnuts we love to eat—because "a fire" was in his head. What's this fire? It's ambiguous. It seems to imply some sort of desire. Some internal pull makes Aengus get up and go to that wood.
- The "fire" in Aengus' head is an example of metaphor. No, Aengus' head isn't literally on fire. But the image of the fire represents this desire, or drive, that takes him to the hazel wood.
Lines 3-4
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
- What's the speaker up to here? Is he trying to make a magic wand? Nope—he's making a fishing rod. Still, we can't help but wonder if there will be more magical stuff to come in this poem…
- Our speaker's using a… berry for bait. That's certainly more poetic than a dirty old worm. Good luck with that, Aengus.
- We also see some alliteration going on in these lines with the repetition of the H sound in "hazel" and "hooked."
- Alliteration is one of the ways that Yeats creates rhythm in this poem. (Check out "Sound Check" for more.)
Lines 5-8
And when the 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
- Lots of alliteration greets us in line 5 with the repetition of all those W words.
- We can also see the use of simile here. The narrator compares stars to moths, saying that they're "moth-like." Lines 5-6—depicting moths flying around and the stars "flickering out"—give us a sense of time passing. It looks like it's nighttime.
- The speaker drops his fishing rod with the berry into a stream, and—lo and behold—he catches a trout. Wow—we didn't know trout ate berries. This trout does, apparently.
- At the end of this stanza, we can also look back to get a sense of the rhyme scheme. Not every line rhymes in the stanza, but nearly every other line does. So we get a scheme that looks like this: ABCBDEFE, where each letter stands for that particular line's end rhyme. For more on all that, check out "Form and Meter."