Fishing

"The Song of Wandering Aengus" begins with a pretty straightforward action. The speaker, Aengus, decides that he wants to go fishing. But then all kinds of magical things happen as a result of his fishing expedition. Fishing itself is a familiar action (chances are most of us, at some point in our lives, have tried it). But in this poem it's also a symbol for other things. The speaker catches a fish, sure, but then he spends the rest of his life "fishing" for a girl he can't find. In this sense, the fishing can be understood as a symbol for searching or seeking.

• Lines 3-4: We see Aengus making his fishing rod here, peeling a hazel wand and hooking a berry to a thread (who knew that fish ate berries?). Aengus' action of making the fishing rod introduces fishing as a motif in the poem. This motif will be expanded on in a later stanza.
• Lines 7-8: Aengus catches a "little silver trout" with his homemade fishing rod. He doesn't have trouble catching this fish. But, as we'll see in the following lines, it will get away from him. The description of Aengus catching the fish here, therefore, works to foreshadow his quest to "catch" the glimmering girl later in the poem.
• Lines 13-16: The fish turns into a glimmering girl, and she gets away from Aengus. Uh-oh, what's Aengus gonna do? He'll go after her, of course. The glimmering girl's disappearance in these lines casts Aengus' fishing in a new light. He catches the fish, and then it turns into a girl, and the girl escapes him. His fishing expedition isn't a success, after all.
• Lines 19-20: Aengus spends the rest of his life searching, or "fishing," for the glimmering girl. So the innocent fishing expedition with which the poem begins has turned into a life-long quest. In this sense, we can understand the fishing motif as an extended metaphor for Aengus' search, or hunt, for the glimmering girl.