Some wishes are not for objects but for a different way of being. Joseph Campbell’s “I Wish and I Wish” makes that kind of longing audible from its opening line. Campbell (1879–1944), also known as Seosamh Mac Cathmhaoil, was a Belfast-born poet and folk-song collector associated with the Irish Literary Revival. He published the poem in The Mountainy Singer (1909), a collection that turned to rural Irish speech, landscape and song for its energy. That context matters, because the poem is not a vague nature fantasy: it names distinct Irish places and treats the desire to become an animal as a serious, joyful longing.
The speaker wishes three times to be transformed. First, a “golden bee / In the blue of the air,” winging “at the mouth of day” to the “honey marges / Of Loch-ciuin-ban.” Then a “little green drake,” then a “silver swan” upon “the stream of Aili.” The wish is not for power or escape to a distant paradise; it is for a smaller, brighter, more fluid existence within a known landscape. The central idea is a yearning to shed human self-consciousness and join the busy, graceful life of air and water. Each creature is chosen for its movement—winging, floating, swimming—and the final exclamation “Gaily, gaily!” gives the whole wish a tone of delighted release rather than melancholy.
The poem’s construction feels like an incantation. It opens with the repeated “I wish and I wish / And I wish I were,” as if the speaker is trying to charm reality into changing. The lines are short, often carrying two or three stresses, and they move quickly, creating a hovering, light rhythm appropriate to a bee or a swan. The rhyme scheme is loose and song-like: “way” pairs with “day,” while sounds such as “ban,” “swan” and “upon” echo without locking the poem into a rigid pattern. This freedom mirrors the speaker’s desire. The word “Or” before the drake and swan also matters: the wish keeps branching, as if one shape cannot contain all the joy being imagined.
Campbell’s imagery is vivid and deliberately simple. The gold of the bee strikes against the blue of the air; the green of the drake and the silver of the swan shimmer on the stream. The phrase “the mouth of day” makes morning feel like an opening the bee can fly through, while “honey marges” turns the lake’s edges into thresholds thick with nectar. “Marges,” an unusual word for margins, suggests both shore and soft boundary. The place-names Loch-ciuin-ban and Aili are not decorative. They anchor the dream in Irish ground and sound, suggesting that this is not anywhere, but a specific beloved place. The repeated participles—“winging,” “floating,” “swimming”—emphasize continuous motion, not arrival.
What makes the poem significant is its fusion of childlike wishing with the cultural work of the Irish Literary Revival. It borrows the shape-shifting energy of older Celtic stories, where heroes and spirits move between forms, and compresses it into a short lyric of pure longing. The poem matters because it turns restlessness into music. It does not explain why the speaker wants to be a bee, drake or swan; it simply lets the wish rise and multiply. That openness lets readers feel the desire themselves—the wish to be lighter, freer, more at home in the living world.