Beggar To Beggar Cried - Analysis

A fantasy of escape that won’t stay pure

The poem stages a beggar talking himself into a new life: he will put off the world, recover in sea air, and make my soul before age strips him down. But Yeats keeps tightening the screw: every time the speaker imagines a clean exit into health, marriage, and respectability, another devil appears. The central claim the poem makes, through this spiraling monologue, is that the speaker’s misery isn’t only circumstantial poverty; it’s also a set of compulsions—sexual, vain, status-hungry—that follow him into whatever “somewhere” he runs to.

The refrain as a diagnosis: being frenzy-struck

The repeated line Beggar to beggar cried, being frenzy-struck feels less like a scene of two people conversing than the report of a mind looping. The word cried pushes the voice toward public performance—street-speech—while frenzy-struck suggests panic, not calm planning. That refrain also makes the wish-list sound compulsive: the speaker can’t simply want; he has to shout the wanting into existence, as if the intensity might substitute for actual change.

Health, soul, and the shame of the body

At first the dream is almost wholesome: recover health, rebuild the soul, outrun the moment when his pate is bare. Then the poem yanks the focus downward. He wants a comfortable wife and house to rid him of the devil in my shoes—the phrase suggests itch, restlessness, the irritation of being always on the move. But the next line is harsher and more intimate: the worse devil is between my thighs. The speaker’s plan for domestic respectability is framed as a kind of exorcism, yet the poem keeps implying that the “demons” are simply human appetites he both feels and despises.

Choosing a wife as choosing a mirror

The speaker’s imagined marriage immediately becomes a negotiation with appearances. He says he would marry a comely lass, then quickly revises: She need not be too comely. The backpedaling is telling: he wants beauty, but not so much beauty that it provokes comparison, jealousy, or humiliation. The poem names that fear outright—there’s a devil in a looking-glass. This line makes vanity into a literal haunt: even if he escapes the street, he can’t escape the mirror’s power to accuse him of what he is and isn’t. The “devil” here is not lust but self-scrutiny, the torment of seeing.

Rich people as beggars: the poem’s sharpest insult

When the speaker turns to wealth, the poem’s social critique becomes more pointed. He doesn’t want her too rich, because the rich / Are driven by wealth the way beggars are driven by the itch. This is a brutal leveling: money is not freedom; it’s another compulsion, another skin-condition of the spirit. And wealth, in his view, ruins language itself—rich people cannot have a humorous happy speech. The beggar imagines humor as a kind of moral health, a proof that you are not owned by your cravings. Yet he is also the one speaking in a frenzy, which complicates the claim: he wants the very ease of speech his agitation keeps sabotaging.

Garden peace, then the geese: the dream’s last interruption

The poem’s final wish is for quiet dignity: grow respected, live at my ease, and listen in the garden’s nightly peace. But Yeats refuses to end on serenity. Into that stillness comes The wind-blown clamour of barnacle-geese, a wild, migratory noise that doesn’t belong to the groomed “garden” fantasy. The geese feel like the outside world returning—restless, seasonal, untameable. Even at the moment of imagined respectability, the sound that arrives is not a hymn of belonging but a reminder of movement and weather.

A harder thought the poem won’t let go

If every stage of the plan is shadowed by a devil—shoes, thighs, looking-glass, wealth—then the most unsettling possibility is that the speaker’s ideal life is only another symptom of the frenzy. The poem doesn’t simply say poverty wounds; it suggests that the dream of being “rid” of oneself can become its own kind of itch, driving him as relentlessly as need.