Nora Hopper Chesson’s “The Chrysoberyl” is a compact but intensely radiant poem of emotional disclosure. Taking its governing image from a gem that appears green in daylight and red under artificial or diminished light, Chesson turns a phenomenon of mineral optics into an account of inward life. The poem is not merely about a stone that changes colour; it is about the conditions under which feeling becomes visible, desire becomes speakable, and the self emerges from the protective forms required by social existence. Its speaker finds in the chrysoberyl an image precise enough to express a divided consciousness: one self belongs to the “indifferent day,” to work, habit, concealment, and restraint; another belongs to moonlight, love, and a kind of ecstatic self-recognition. The poem’s achievement lies in making this division feel not like hypocrisy but like a profound and perhaps inevitable rhythm of human experience.

The title immediately directs attention to a material object, but Chesson’s gem is never treated as a piece of decorative ornament alone. Chrysoberyl is a mineral associated with remarkable optical effects, and the particular colour-changing variety most familiar to modern readers is often called alexandrite. In one kind of illumination, it may seem green; in another, it may appear red. Such a stone was especially suited to late nineteenth-century poetic imagination, which was fascinated by altered states, elusive surfaces, secret affinities, and the possibility that matter itself might conceal unsuspected brilliance. Chesson begins with the almost proverbial phrase “Men say,” as though she were invoking a piece of received lore. Yet this apparently impersonal observation swiftly becomes intimate: “I and my heart are like that changing stone.” The movement from public report to private confession is central to the poem. Knowledge of the gem becomes self-knowledge.

The phrase “Men say” also creates a subtle distance between the speaker and the world that names, classifies, and observes the stone. The speaker initially presents the chrysoberyl through an external, perhaps masculine, authority: “Men say there is a stone shines green alway / Through the long hours of the indifferent day.” The conventional world sees the stone’s daylight colour; it may believe this colour defines the gem. But the speaker knows that this apparent constancy is incomplete. When night comes, the gem “blazes scarlet.” The contrast between “shines” and “blazes” is significant. Daylight permits a steady, restrained luminosity; night releases fire. Chesson thus establishes a distinction not simply between two colours but between two modes of being: one measured and continuous, the other passionate, sudden, and transformative.

The colours carry a rich symbolic burden without becoming mechanically allegorical. Green is traditionally connected with growth, the natural world, spring, freshness, and vitality. Yet it can also suggest concealment, coolness, jealousy, inexperience, or an unripe condition. Chesson’s “lucent green” is not dark or dead; it possesses its own delicacy and beauty. The daytime self is therefore not presented as a lie. It is a self adapted to visibility, a self whose brightness is moderated by the conditions in which it must exist. Scarlet, by contrast, carries associations of blood, flame, erotic intensity, sacrifice, royal magnificence, and spiritual revelation. It is an emphatically bodily and emotional colour. When the speaker becomes scarlet, she is not merely more colourful; she is more ardent, more vulnerable, and more fully animated by desire.

The poem’s repeated description of the day as “indifferent” is especially revealing. Daylight is conventionally associated with clarity, reason, moral transparency, and public truth. Chesson reverses these expectations. The day in “The Chrysoberyl” is not illuminating in the deepest sense because it is emotionally indifferent. It belongs to a world of routine that neither recognizes nor nourishes the speaker’s inward intensity. The phrase “the working world” makes this social dimension explicit. Day is the realm of obligation, labour, public roles, and practical demands. It is a world that requires the speaker to “hide” herself. The poem does not condemn work in a simplistic manner, nor does it imply that ordinary life is wholly empty. But it registers the cost of living under conditions that allow little room for the full expression of love and longing.

This opposition between public day and private night is shaped by the cultural pressures surrounding female self-expression in Chesson’s period. Writing at the close of the Victorian age and into the early twentieth century, Chesson inherited a society in which women’s desire was frequently managed through conventions of modesty, domesticity, and emotional reticence. Poetry offered one of the spaces in which those constraints could be explored, displaced, and resisted. The speaker of “The Chrysoberyl” does not make a political argument in overt terms, but her language of veils, sheaths, hiding, and casting aside suggests a consciousness trained in concealment. She must wear a covering during the day; she must protect her inner fire from the demands of the “working world.” At night, however, she claims an alternative authority over her own body and heart.

The verbs in the central movement of the poem make this claim forceful. “I thrust my sheaths away” is a startling phrase. “Sheaths” ordinarily protect a blade, and the word therefore implies that the speaker contains a hidden sharpness as well as a hidden radiance. To thrust the sheaths away is not simply to drift into reverie; it is to perform an act of urgent release. Likewise, “I cast aside my veil” evokes the ceremonial removal of a covering associated with privacy, femininity, mourning, marriage, or sacred mystery. The gesture is self-directed. No lover removes the veil for her; no external figure grants permission. The speaker acts. Her awakening is enabled by night and moonlight, but it is also chosen. This balance between environmental transformation and personal agency gives the poem much of its vitality.

Chesson’s language of veiling and unveiling draws upon a long literary tradition in which truth is imagined as something hidden beneath coverings. Romantic and Symbolist poetry often treats the visible world as a screen concealing more intense realities, while devotional writing frequently describes spiritual knowledge as revelation or the lifting of a veil. “The Chrysoberyl” participates in both traditions. The speaker’s experience is sensual, even erotic, but it is also given a spiritual vocabulary. Love comes as a “scarlet flood” that can “transfigure” her. The word “transfigure” is not casual. It recalls the Christian account of the Transfiguration, in which Christ’s divine glory becomes visible in radiant light. Chesson adapts this sacred resonance to an individual experience of desire. Love does not diminish the speaker’s being or merely overwhelm it; it reveals a splendour already latent within her.

The phrase “Love’s scarlet flood” is remarkable for the way it fuses colour, motion, and bodily sensation. Scarlet has already been associated with the stone’s nocturnal blaze, but now colour becomes liquid. A flood is powerful, enveloping, and difficult to contain. It can signify abundance and liberation, but it also threatens the boundaries that preserve ordinary order. In this image, the speaker’s careful daytime containment gives way to inundation. The heart is no longer protected by sheaths or veils. Yet Chesson’s syntax makes the event celebratory rather than catastrophic: love’s flood does not erase the self but “transfigure[s]” it. Passion is represented as an intensification of identity, a change that allows the speaker to become more truly herself.

The poem is an extended metaphor, but it is also a dramatic lyric utterance. The first-person voice gives the work an immediate confessional energy, even though the speaker’s circumstances remain deliberately general. We are not told who the beloved is, whether love is fulfilled or unfulfilled, whether the night is literal or imagined, or what event has caused the transformation. This withholding is artistically important. It allows the poem to concentrate on the emotional process itself rather than on narrative particulars. The chrysoberyl becomes a vessel for many possible experiences: secret love, artistic awakening, religious ecstasy, the discovery of a private identity, or the liberation felt when social surveillance recedes.

Indeed, “Love” in the poem has a productive ambiguity. It may refer to romantic attachment, and the scarlet intensity of the language strongly encourages that reading. But the poem does not identify Love with a particular person. Love functions almost as a sovereign force, capitalized and endowed with the capacity to transform. It may therefore include the erotic, while also reaching toward artistic inspiration and spiritual devotion. This expansiveness is characteristic of much fin-de-siècle lyric poetry, in which desire is often represented as an atmospheric power rather than a narrowly defined social relationship. The speaker is “beaconed” by her “own fire” toward “the place of heart’s desire.” Love is both within her and beyond her, a flame that originates in the self yet directs the self toward an imagined destination.

The image of the beacon deepens the poem’s meditation on light. At first, light seems to be the force that determines the stone’s appearance: day produces green, night produces scarlet. Yet the final stanza complicates this simple physical analogy. The speaker says that “The changeless light / Has touched me and transfigured; my own fire / Beacons me.” Here light is both changeless and changing. It may be read as moonlight, as a divine illumination, as the enduring truth of love, or as an inner principle that is constant even when outward appearances vary. The paradox is beautiful: the speaker changes, but the light that enables her change is “changeless.” Chesson suggests that transformation may reveal, rather than contradict, a deeper continuity.

This paradox is essential to the poem’s philosophical interest. Is the green self the true self, or is the scarlet self? The poem refuses a crude answer. The speaker is “like that changing stone,” and the stone’s identity includes both colours. It is not less a chrysoberyl by day because it blazes at night. Similarly, the speaker’s concealed daytime existence is not simply false, even if it is “dark and dull” in comparison with nocturnal fire. Human identity, Chesson implies, is relational and conditional. Different lights bring different capacities into view. A person may be reserved in public and passionate in solitude; dutiful in one setting and visionary in another. These changes need not indicate deceit. They may reveal the complex truth that the self is never exhausted by a single appearance.

At the same time, the poem unmistakably values the night-time transformation. The final stanza gathers its language into a crescendo of certainty: “I am a chrysoberyl, and the night / Is here, and I am changed.” The repetitions of “I am” create a ceremonial self-announcement. The speaker who began by saying “I and my heart are like” the stone now identifies herself directly with it. Metaphor has become embodiment. This intensification gives the conclusion its emotional force. The speaker no longer observes the gem from outside; she inhabits its condition. Her self-knowledge is no longer tentative, and the poem’s return to the title word feels like an act of possession. She can name what she is because she has entered the illumination in which that identity appears.

Chesson’s handling of night deserves particular attention. In many literary traditions, night signifies danger, ignorance, death, sin, or disorientation. It may conceal transgression and estrange people from the social order. “The Chrysoberyl” acknowledges night’s association with secrecy, but it turns darkness into a medium of revelation. The moon “makes beautiful and clean / The working world.” This is a wonderfully unexpected description. Moonlight does not destroy the world of labour; it alters its aspect. The familiar becomes beautiful, and the compromised becomes clean. The night thus possesses an aesthetic and ethical power: it releases the world from the dulling pressure of utility. Under the moon, things are seen not merely for what they do but for what they are capable of becoming.

This transformation of the working world bears comparison with the artistic vision associated with Romanticism and later Aestheticism. Writers in these traditions often oppose the calculating, industrial, or utilitarian daylight world to an imaginative realm in which objects recover mystery and beauty. Chesson’s poem participates in this larger cultural response to modernity. The “working world” is not described in technological detail, but it evokes an age increasingly shaped by urban schedules, wage labour, social regulation, and the discipline of clock time. Against this atmosphere, the moonlit vision offers not an escape from reality but a revision of reality. The speaker sees that daily life has another face when touched by imagination and love.

Chesson’s literary context enriches this vision. She is often associated with the Celtic Revival, the movement that sought renewed imaginative life through Irish legend, folklore, song, and landscape. Her poetry frequently demonstrates an attraction to enchantment, shifting forms, and worlds in which natural objects carry spiritual or emotional meaning. “The Chrysoberyl” contains no direct reference to Celtic myth, but its sense of metamorphosis belongs readily beside the shapeshifting figures and enchanted materials of Celtic storytelling. In such traditions, the boundary between human and nonhuman life is often porous, and transformations reveal hidden kinship rather than mere fantasy. Chesson’s speaker does not become less human by becoming gemlike; she finds a more expressive language for human feeling in the stone’s mutable colour.

The poem also belongs to the decadent and Symbolist currents of its age, though it is more emotionally direct than much decadent writing. Late nineteenth-century artists were drawn to jewels because gems condensed several compelling ideas: rarity, sensuality, artifice, hardness, colour, luxury, and secret interior fire. A jewel can be admired as an object of exquisite surface, but it can also seem to possess a soul-like inwardness. Chesson uses the chrysoberyl in this tradition, yet she avoids making it merely ornamental. The gem’s value lies in its responsiveness to light. It is beautiful because it changes. In this sense, the poem quietly challenges any ideal of beauty founded on immobility. True radiance is not fixed; it is active, contingent, and alive to the world around it.

The sound and texture of Chesson’s diction reinforce the poem’s movement from restraint to release. Early phrases such as “long hours,” “indifferent day,” and “hide myself” have a subdued, lingering quality. Their repeated temporal language makes daylight seem prolonged and emotionally tiring. By contrast, the night section is animated by stronger verbs: “thrust,” “cast,” “bid,” “let,” “blazes,” “touched,” “beacons,” and “burning.” Even without relying on a narrative event, the poem generates momentum through these verbal choices. The speaker begins in a condition of concealment and ends in an active state of shining. Her transformation is not abstract; it is enacted through language that becomes increasingly forceful and incandescent.

The repeated phrases “indifferent day” and “I am a chrysoberyl” provide a different kind of structure. Repetition in lyric poetry can imitate obsession, prayer, incantation, or self-persuasion. Here it performs all of these functions to some degree. “Indifferent day” returns as a reminder of the world from which the speaker must emerge. It names the emotional climate of repression. “I am a chrysoberyl,” repeated near the conclusion, answers that indifference with assertion. The speaker gives herself a new emblem, one capable of holding her variability without shame. The final recurrence of the title phrase is therefore not decorative closure; it is an affirmation that identity can be discovered through imaginative naming.

There is also a striking tension between passivity and agency in the poem’s account of transformation. The speaker is “touched” by light, and Love floods over her; these are experiences that arrive from beyond conscious control. Yet she also removes her coverings and follows the beacon of her own fire. Chesson does not reduce desire either to external fate or to individual will. Rather, she imagines an encounter between the two. The world offers the necessary light, but the self must respond. This idea gives the poem an ethical dimension. To become radiant is not simply to receive illumination; it is to consent to one’s own depth, to risk visibility, and to move toward what the heart desires.

Such consent is especially moving because the poem never pretends that it is permanent. The contrast between day and night implies recurrence. Morning will presumably return, and with it the social conditions that encourage concealment. The speaker’s scarlet blaze is therefore precious partly because it is temporary. Yet the poem does not end in anxiety about the coming day. It remains resolutely in the present tense of night: “’tis night.” This conclusion gives the lyric a carpe diem intensity. The speaker does not deny that life contains cycles of dullness and revelation; she insists that the moment of revelation must be fully inhabited while it lasts.

Modern readers may find in this pattern an unusually sympathetic account of divided life. Many people recognize the feeling of becoming different in different environments: at work and at home, in public and in intimacy, under judgment and in solitude. Chesson’s poem offers no simplistic command to abandon all social roles. Its speaker has known the necessity of hiding. But the poem insists that concealment should not be mistaken for the whole person. Beneath the day’s manageable green is another capacity for colour, heat, and movement. The value of the chrysoberyl metaphor is that it rejects the demand for a flat, permanently consistent identity. A changing self can still be a coherent self; indeed, change may be the very form of its coherence.

The poem’s emotional resonance finally comes from its confidence in latent splendour. “I that was dark and dull am burning bright” is deliberately dramatic, but it earns its intensity through the preceding movement of suppression and release. The speaker does not claim that she has manufactured a new self from nothing. Her fire was always present, waiting for the light in which it could become visible. This conviction is at once romantic and consoling. It proposes that apparent dullness may be a condition imposed by circumstance rather than an essential truth about a person’s value or capacity.

“The Chrysoberyl” thus transforms a small fact of natural science into a luminous meditation on love, identity, social restraint, and spiritual awakening. Its gem is green and scarlet, hidden and blazing, earthly and almost supernatural. Its speaker is likewise multiple without being fragmented: she is capable of concealment, but also of revelation; shaped by the working world, but not defined by it; responsive to love, yet animated by her own fire. Chesson’s poem remains compelling because it understands that the deepest transformations are not always loud public revolutions. Sometimes they occur in the altered light of night, when a person lays aside a veil, recognizes the heart’s desire, and discovers that what seemed dark and dull can burn with extraordinary colour.

William Butler Yeats’s “Beggar to Beggar Cried” is one of those deceptively compact poems in which a comic voice opens abruptly onto grave metaphysical territory. Its speaker seems, at first encounter, merely eccentric: a destitute man announces a series of plans for recuperation, marriage, domestic comfort, social esteem, and rural retirement. Yet every proposed remedy gives rise to a new anxiety. The poem is therefore not a simple fantasy of escape from poverty. It is a dramatically alert study of restless desire, bodily decline, sexual unease, vanity, class resentment, and the strange human habit of imagining happiness only by qualifying it out of existence. Yeats gives his beggar an idiom of rough wit and direct appetite, but the voice carries concerns central to his own mature poetry: how one might make a soul under the pressure of time, how physical existence entangles aspiration, and how the dream of peace is haunted by the very energies from which one wishes to withdraw.

The poem belongs to Responsibilities, published in 1914, a collection formed during a period of intense personal and public transition for Yeats. Ireland stood near the threshold of revolutionary change, as arguments concerning Home Rule, cultural nationalism, class, land, and political authority grew increasingly urgent. Europe, meanwhile, was moving toward the catastrophe of the First World War. Yeats’s poems from this period frequently register a loss of confidence in the idealized rhetoric of earlier nationalism. They turn instead toward sharper social observation, personal disillusionment, historical complexity, and an often bracingly unromantic recognition of human motives. “Beggar to Beggar Cried” does not name political events, but it arises from a culture in which the relation between privilege and deprivation could not be ignored. Its choice of a beggar as central consciousness is significant: a figure conventionally treated as marginal becomes the medium through which the poem addresses desires shared by all classes.

That democratic movement is not sentimental. Yeats neither turns poverty into moral purity nor uses the beggar simply as a picturesque emblem of old Ireland. The speaker is frustrated, lustful, self-protective, envious, and funny. He wants the security associated with respectable domestic life, but he regards the comforts of that life with suspicion. A wife is desired as a cure for inward disturbance; wealth is wanted only up to the point at which it corrupts; beauty is attractive but alarming; a home promises peace, although the imagination of peace remains full of noise. This is a psychology of contradiction rather than a social program. The beggar’s marginal position gives Yeats unusual freedom to expose wishes that polite society often disguises. What a cultivated, prosperous speaker might phrase as a longing for repose, companionship, self-knowledge, and independence appears here in its more bodily, unfiltered forms.

The recurring statement that “Beggar to beggar cried, being frenzy-struck” is crucial to the poem’s dramatic method. It introduces a small but important distance between the utterance and its presentation. We hear the beggar’s passionate declarations, but an observing voice frames them as the speech of someone overcome by frenzy. The phrase is not merely descriptive; it makes the poem theatrical. One can imagine a beggar addressing another in a road, a marketplace, or a public threshold, suddenly launching into an extravagant vision of reforming his life. The repeated frame also turns each burst of speech into a kind of refrain, a return to the central fact that longing has become compulsive. The man’s plans are not calm resolutions. They are cries generated by an agitation he cannot master.

“Frenzy-struck” has a suggestively ambiguous force. It may imply madness, fever, spiritual disturbance, intoxication, sexual urgency, or a temporary possession by some force beyond reason. In Yeats’s poetry, states of heightened agitation are often double-edged. They can be humiliating and destructive, but they can also reveal truth more nakedly than conventional composure permits. The beggar’s frenzy does not make him wise in any simple sense; he is plainly caught in self-defeating habits of thought. Yet his speech is also penetrating. His comments on wealth, desire, and self-regard strip away the reassuring surfaces of social life. The poem invites readers to smile at him, but it also makes that smile uncomfortable, because the supposed madman recognizes the devils that more respectable figures carefully conceal.

The opening wish to “put off the world and go somewhere” immediately establishes the longing for withdrawal. The phrase “put off the world” is wonderfully broad. It suggests taking off a burden, casting aside social obligations, abandoning the habits of public life, and perhaps even preparing for death. The desire to recover “health again in the sea air” belongs to a familiar literary and cultural ideal. The sea, especially in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century imagination, could signify cleansing, renewal, distance from urban corruption, and access to elemental life. Yet Yeats does not allow the image to settle into pastoral serenity. The beggar wants to go “somewhere,” an indefinite destination that indicates the vagueness of escape fantasies. He does not possess a fully envisioned alternative life; he knows chiefly that his present condition is unbearable.

The phrase “make my soul before my pate is bare” joins spiritual aspiration to comic physical anxiety. To “make” one’s soul suggests active moral or imaginative labor: a person must shape an inner identity before age or death forecloses the possibility. Yeats repeatedly returned to the idea that the self is not simply given but fashioned through effort, choice, art, discipline, and confrontation with fate. Here, however, the grand ambition of soul-making is jostled by the colloquial “pate,” meaning head, and by the specifically comic fear of baldness. Aging appears not as a noble abstraction but as an embarrassing bodily fact. The line is characteristic of the poem’s tonal brilliance. It permits a genuine terror of mortality to emerge through self-mocking diction. The beggar fears that time will expose him, literally and figuratively, before he has become someone worthy of his own regard.

Yeats was himself deeply preoccupied with age during the middle portion of his career. In later poems such as “Sailing to Byzantium,” aging becomes the occasion for an argument about art, spirit, and the mortality of the body. “Beggar to Beggar Cried” approaches the same territory from a deliberately lower, earthier register. The speaker does not seek entry into an ideal city of art or imagine a transformation into permanent artistic form. He wants sea air, a wife, a house, respect, and birds audible from a garden. His is an aspiration toward ordinary sufficiency. Yet the poem shows that ordinary sufficiency may be as difficult to attain as transcendence. The beggar’s domestic dream is no less fraught than the loftiest spiritual project, because the self that enters the dream carries its devils with it.

The poem’s demonology is one of its most memorable features. The “devil in my shoes” likely evokes the discomforts and irritations of bodily life: poverty, restlessness, the ache of walking, the sense of being driven onward by a nuisance one cannot remove. The phrase may also have a more figurative meaning, suggesting a compulsion that makes the speaker incapable of staying still. The “worse devil” between his thighs is more overtly sexual. Yeats does not veil the matter in elevated euphemism. Sexual desire is presented as a tormenting, almost demonic energy, neither romanticized nor denied. Marriage is imagined as a means of getting rid of this devil, but the reader quickly sees the irony. A wife cannot simply exorcise desire, because desire is not an external creature that can be domesticated by possession. It is a condition of the self.

The sequence of devils develops further when the speaker worries that even a “comely lass” may prove dangerous if she is too beautiful. His qualification, “let it pass,” makes the thought sound improvised, as though he is arguing with himself in public. He wants attractiveness, but not enough attractiveness to produce jealousy, insecurity, competition, or distraction. Behind the comic calculation lies a sharp insight into possessive desire. The beggar does not seek beauty for its own sake; he seeks a manageable version of it, one that will not intensify his consciousness of inadequacy. The “devil in a looking-glass” then turns the problem inward. A mirror may reflect the wife’s beauty, but more importantly it reflects the observer. Vanity, self-comparison, aging, and sexual insecurity converge in this image. The devil is not simply a beautiful woman or a tempting surface. It is the self-consciousness awakened by seeing oneself seen.

The looking-glass carries particular weight in a Yeatsian context because Yeats was fascinated throughout his career by masks, images, doubles, and the difficult relation between the self one inhabits and the self one imagines. The mirror in this poem is not an instrument of stable knowledge. It produces disturbance. To look is to encounter an unwanted rival, perhaps one’s younger self, perhaps an idealized self, perhaps the judgment of others internalized as one’s own gaze. The beggar’s anxiety is thus not only sexual but existential. He suspects that any arrangement of external comfort will be invaded by inward division. No sooner does he picture marriage than he recognizes the demonic force of self-regard.

The speaker’s comments on money are equally incisive. He does not reject wealth from a position of easy moral superiority. Rather, he says that the rich are “driven by wealth as beggars by the itch.” This simile is startling because it collapses a social distinction that is usually treated as absolute. Beggars are driven by an itch: an involuntary, irritating, persistent sensation associated with physical misery and social stigma. The rich, in turn, are driven by wealth: what appears to be abundance becomes a compulsion. Wealth does not free them; it itches. The comparison offers a grimly egalitarian account of bondage. Poverty produces immediate material suffering, but possession generates its own forms of enslavement: accumulation, anxiety, competition, vigilance, and the inability to rest.

At the same time, the statement should not be mistaken for a denial of economic inequality. Yeats does not suggest that wealth and begging are equivalent conditions. The beggar’s desire for a “comfortable” house makes clear that material deprivation is real and painful. What he recognizes is that money cannot solve the whole human problem. A person may be poor and desperate for shelter; a person may be rich and still ruled by acquisitiveness. The poem’s social intelligence lies in holding both truths together. It refuses sentimental poverty, but it also refuses the fantasy that prosperity necessarily produces freedom. This ambivalence gives the beggar’s critique of the rich a bitter authority. He speaks from exclusion, but he sees that inclusion in the world of wealth might bring another bondage rather than final deliverance.

The phrase “humorous happy speech” is especially rich. “Humorous” here can mean witty or cheerful, but it also retains older associations with temperament and disposition. The rich, driven by wealth, cannot possess a speech that is at once light, balanced, and happy. Their words are constrained by the force that possesses them. The beggar’s own speech is humorous in precisely this sense: it is full of comic turns, but its comedy arises from distress. Yeats makes verbal liveliness a measure of psychic freedom. The ability to speak with genuine humor would mean that one is not entirely ruled by appetite, fear, money, or vanity. Yet the poem does not grant this freedom easily. Its speaker’s lively idiom is evidence both of vitality and of instability. He can make us laugh, but he cannot quite make himself happy.

The fantasy culminates in a vision of earned respectability: “there I’ll grow respected at my ease.” The wording is deliberate. “Grow” suggests a natural, gradual development, as though respect might flourish in the garden along with plants. “At my ease” promises an end to itinerancy, humiliation, and the necessity of performing one’s need before strangers. For a beggar, to be respected is not merely to enjoy vanity; it is to recover social personhood. Begging exposes one to dismissal and contempt. The desire for respect is therefore profoundly understandable. But Yeats places it within the poem’s ongoing pattern of self-questioning. Respect is imagined as an effect of domestic settlement, not as something generated by the beggar’s present identity. He longs to become acceptable to society, perhaps because he has internalized society’s judgment that his present self is unacceptable.

The final auditory image complicates and elevates the domestic dream. Amid the “garden’s nightly peace,” the speaker wishes to hear “the wind-blown clamor of the barnacle-geese.” The juxtaposition of “peace” and “clamor” is not accidental. Peace is not silence. The imagined refuge includes a wild, migratory, communal noise, carried by wind from beyond the garden. Barnacle geese have long been associated with coastal and northern landscapes; their presence brings the sea-adjacent world of the poem’s opening desire into the final pastoral setting. They may suggest seasonal change, flight, recurrence, and the restless motions of nature. The beggar imagines himself settled, yet the sound he values comes from creatures defined by movement. His desired peace contains an echo of the wandering life he intends to leave.

This closing image also demonstrates Yeats’s ability to make a poem’s tonal complexity audible. “Clamor” is not conventionally beautiful; it is a word of tumult, crowding, and disturbance. Yet the geese’s clamor becomes part of the garden’s nocturnal harmony. The natural world is not pacified in order to serve the human wish for tranquility. Instead, tranquility is redefined as the capacity to receive wildness without being shattered by it. This is perhaps the deepest version of the beggar’s dream. He does not finally imagine a completely silent, controlled, sanitized life. He imagines a dwelling place from which he can hear disorder at a distance, as music rather than menace. Whether he could truly attain such a relation to the world is another question, but the image allows the poem a moment of genuine beauty that neither mocks nor entirely confirms his hope.

There are revealing parallels between this poem and “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” an earlier Yeats lyric in which a speaker yearns to leave the city for a small cabin, bean-rows, bees, and the changing sounds of a secluded island. Both poems imagine retreat as a response to inward pressure. Both discover that the desired place is shaped by sound: in “Innisfree,” the “lake water lapping” persists in the heart; here, the wind-borne geese give the desired garden its sonic identity. But the difference between the poems is equally illuminating. “Innisfree” sustains a dream of elemental simplicity with relative lyric assurance. “Beggar to Beggar Cried” subjects the dream of retirement to comic, sexual, and social complications. The later poem has learned that no island or garden can remove the devils of the body and the looking-glass. Its pastoral is more skeptical, but also more psychologically exact.

The poem may also be placed beside Yeats’s interest in Irish folk speech and popular ballad traditions. Its repeated formula, plain declarations, vivid proverbial comparisons, and mixture of roughness with lyric image give it something of the force of a spoken tale. Yeats had long valued rural oral culture, though his relation to it was shaped by the complexities of class, literary mediation, and cultural revival. In this poem, he does not attempt a documentary transcription of a beggar’s speech. Rather, he creates an artfully concentrated dramatic idiom that can sound both proverbial and individual. The result is not realism in a narrow sense but a stylized voice capable of carrying social comedy and philosophical unease at once.

Its treatment of marriage deserves particular attention. The beggar imagines a “comfortable wife and house” as remedies for devils, but the adjective “comfortable” is revealing. He dreams less of romantic ecstasy than of insulation from discomfort. Marriage becomes an instrument of stabilization: it might regulate desire, provide shelter, create social legitimacy, and protect him from loneliness. Yet his instant anxiety about beauty and wealth exposes the inadequacy of this instrumental view. A spouse cannot be reduced to a solution for the speaker’s internal disorder. The poem does not attack marriage itself; rather, it dramatizes the impossible burden placed on it when it is asked to cure mortality, sexuality, self-disgust, class shame, and the fear of social invisibility.

In this respect, “Beggar to Beggar Cried” is a poem about the human tendency to externalize the sources of unhappiness. The speaker imagines that a change of air, a house, a wife, a moderate income, and a garden will make him whole. But his very descriptions reveal that the trouble is not confined to circumstance. He will carry into his new life the devils in his shoes, between his thighs, and in the mirror. Yeats’s perspective is not cruelly deterministic. Material changes matter; health, shelter, companionship, and dignity are not trivial goods. But the poem insists that inward unrest cannot be permanently solved by rearranging outward conditions. This is an ancient philosophical insight, familiar from Stoic thought and from religious traditions that locate suffering in attachment, yet Yeats gives it a modern and distinctly comic embodiment.

The emotional power of the poem comes from its refusal to choose between mockery and compassion. The beggar is ridiculous in his restless calculations, yet the reader can feel the ache beneath them. Who has not imagined that one decisive alteration—a move, a relationship, a better income, a more flattering appearance, a quieter home—would finally bring repose? Who has not immediately qualified the wish with fears of what the desired object might cost? Yeats makes the beggar’s predicament recognizable without making it comfortable. The laughter that the poem invites is tempered by the awareness that its speaker is trying, however incoherently, to articulate a life worth living before time defeats him.

There is, finally, an extraordinary generosity in the poem’s decision to let a socially disregarded figure voice such large questions. The beggar asks what it means to make a soul, to manage desire, to escape the tyranny of money, to live with one’s reflected image, and to hear the wild world from a place of safety. These are not merely the concerns of the educated, the prosperous, or the artistically ambitious. Yeats locates them in a voice marked by hardship and frenzy, thereby unsettling conventional assumptions about who may speak philosophically. The poem’s brilliance lies in its compression of high and low registers: soul-making and baldness, devils and shoes, wealth and itching, domestic gardens and migratory geese. Each juxtaposition expands the moral range of the poem.

“Beggar to Beggar Cried” remains moving because it understands that the wish for peace is never simply foolish, even when it is framed in foolish terms. The beggar’s dream is compromised by vanity and appetite, but it is also animated by a genuine hunger for health, affection, dignity, and a place in the world. Yeats does not offer easy consolation. The repeated cry suggests that frenzy may be cyclical, that desire may endlessly reproduce itself, and that no domestic arrangement can wholly silence the inner devils. Yet the final geese do not merely negate the dream. Their wind-blown clamor gives it shape, atmosphere, and a strange grandeur. In that sound, the poem discovers a beauty adequate to unrest: not escape from the world, but a fleeting imagined condition in which the world’s noise can be heard, endured, and perhaps even loved.