WB Yeats’s Brown Penny is a short poem written in 1910 and lightheartedly deals with the serious business of a young man considering falling in love. The young man, perhaps Yeats himself, tosses a coin, the brown penny, to see if he is old enough to love. In an age riddled with superstition, such an action may not have sounded as much fun as it does today. Victorian Britain was a society that took the behavior of ordinary objects seriously, hence all the wedding traditions we are still familiar with, such as wearing white, wearing a veil, having something borrowed, something blue, etc. The Victorians even had a theory about what kind of marriage a couple would enjoy based on the color of the bride’s dress, the day of the wedding, and even the weather. So Yeats is, perhaps in jest, borrowing from this culture to determine his own destiny.
The corner encourages him to “go and love” especially if the lady “is young and beautiful”. The last line of the first verse “wrapped in the locks of the hair” suggests the loop of the coin as it travels through the air and is based on an image favored by Yeats of being wrapped in the hair of his beloved, as in “He command her beloved to be at peace” (line 10: and your hair falls on my chest).
In contrast to the joy of the first verse, the second introduces a feeling of frustration at the immense power of love and its ability to deceive. “Love is the crooked thing,” she says, in other words, something that twists and turns, not in beautiful ringlets like a girl’s long hair, but in an unpredictable way that she can confuse. “Crooked” of course also implies dishonesty, even illegal activity, so love is on the wrong side of the tracks in this verse. Yeats has made an enemy of him, testing his wisdom. “There is none wise enough to find all that is in it,” is a desperate line, commenting on the immensity of the task facing a young man encountering romance for the first time. Today, love is perhaps a more transient thing, easily experienced and quickly abandoned if it fails, but in Yeats’s day, when propriety mattered and behavior was governed by religious belief, people had to think very carefully before entering into a relationship, carefully considering not only the possible uncomfortable outcomes of a difficult romance, but also what other people might think. Falling in love promised a minefield of adverse social consequences.
But it is not the social setting that concerns Yeats here, it is the enigmatic quality of love that mystifies him. The world would end, he says, before anyone, no matter how wise, could understand it. To use the stars and the moon in this context is to deliberately invoke the imagery of the Romantic poets of an earlier century, but to give it a more morbid twist.
Still, far from discouraging the young man, the size of the task before him only encourages him further. “You can’t start too soon” returns the poem to its joyful beginning and leaves the reader with a wry smile. This is the destiny of all humanity, that no matter how insurmountable the odds of finding true love, each of us tries, time and time again. Given the unfathomable nature of the exercise, flipping a brown penny has as much chance of bringing us success as anything else.
