Stanza 3 Summary

Lines 17-20

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;

• Wait a minute… what just happened? Aengus is old now? Wow, time has really flown by, hasn't it? That was quite a leap from the last stanza.
• The fact that Yeats shows us Aengus as an old man in these lines also reflects another important revision that the poem makes to the original Celtic myth. Aengus is a god in Celtic mythology and of course gods don't grow old. But this Aengus does. So in Yeats' poem, Aengus is more mortal than he is immortal.
• And what has Aengus spent his time doing since that fateful day when the trout turned into a woman? Well, he's been "wandering" around looking for her. Talk about infatuation—he only saw this girl for a second, but he's fallen so madly in love with her that he's spent all his time searching for her. It's as if Aengus has been caught by the girl (whereas in the first stanza we see him catching a fish).
• The description of our speaker "wandering,/ Through hollow lands and hilly lands" (note the alliteration of the H words) gives us the sense that he's covered a lot of ground looking for this girl. He's really been everywhere.
• These lines also reflect Aengus' optimism. We'd think that, after spending his whole life looking for the glimmering girl and not finding her, Aengus would just give up hope. But not this guy. He's still pretty hopeful that he'll get to "kiss her lips and take [hold] her hands." Good luck with that, big guy.

Lines 21-24

And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun. 

• Aengus imagines walking among the "long dappled grass" with this glimmering girl.
• Here we also get an explicit mention of a major theme of the poem: "time" (22). The speaker's already spent a huge amount of time looking for this girl, but here he speaks as if he still has a whole lot more time left. And what does he want to do with all this time? He wants to "pluck [apples]" with her "till time and times are done." Party time, are we right?
• The image of the duo "plucking" the "silver apples of the moon" and the "golden apples of the sun" is ambiguous here. On one level, it underscores the importance of time in this stanza. The "moon" and the "sun" signify the passing of days. Moon represents nighttime, and sun daytime.
• On another level, though, the very fact that the speaker imagines the sun and moon bearing silver and golden "apples" is interesting. Apples don't grow on, or from, the moon and the sun. At least the last time we checked they didn't. But by giving us this image of the sun and moon bearing apples, Aengus evokes a sense of nature that's magical. We're in an alternate reality here. We're in a world where the sun and moon are essentially fruit trees—far out, gang.
• These final lines give us a lot more sound to process. Not only is there more alliteration (with T words like "till," "time," and "times"), we also get consonance with all the P sounds in words like "dappled," "apples," and "pluck."
• Finally, this stanza's rhyme scheme is the same as in the previous two: ABCBDEFE.
• For more on this poem's sounds, hit up "Sound Check." For more on its form, "Form and Meter" is the place to be.