“Beggar to Beggar Cried” opens with a voice already in flight: “Time to put off the world and go somewhere.” But before the sea air can promise health, the refrain cuts in: “Beggar to beggar cried, being frenzy-struck.” That line is the poem’s heartbeat. It turns what might have been a pensive lyric into a raucous dramatic monologue, and it insists from the start that the speaker is not calmly planning an escape but is caught in a kind of fit. The poem’s central joke, and its sharp pathos, is that the fantasy of self-renewal cannot leave the beggar behind.
The dream begins as a spiritual turning. He wants to “make my soul before my pate is bare,” as if preparing for death or judgment. Yet the very next stanza tumbles into smaller hungers: “a comfortable wife and house,” first to cure “the devil in my shoes,” then to deal with “the worse devil that is between my thighs.” The soul quietly disappears. The word “devil” becomes a chain running through the poem—poverty, sexual appetite, and soon vanity. Each escape hatch leads back to the body.
Yeats gives the poem a short, four-line stanza and a repeated refrain, so the effect is less like a meditation than a street-corner rant. The rhymes are often comfortable—“lass,” “pass,” “glass”—but the dream itself is full of qualifications. He wants a wife, yet “she need not be too comely,” because “there’s a devil in a looking-glass.” That glass is a brilliant little image: it turns the poem from appetite to self-image, from what the beggar wants to how he fears being seen. He wants enough beauty to satisfy desire but not enough to provoke jealousy; he wants money in the form of respect, but not wealth, because the rich cannot have “a humorous happy speech.” Each ideal is a negotiation with fear.
This is why the repeated phrase “being frenzy-struck” matters so much. The poem’s speaker is not choosing; he is being driven. The word “struck” suggests a blow or a possession, and the identical refrain gives every hope the same manic pitch. Even the phrase “beggar to beggar” closes the scene in a circle. The speaker is not addressing a comfortable listener who might help; he is talking to another beggar, or perhaps to himself. The fantasy is shut inside the condition it wants to escape.
The final stanza seems to offer peace. The beggar imagines growing “respected at my ease” and sitting in a garden’s “nightly peace.” Then the last line tears the image open: he will hear “the wind-blown clamor of the barnacle-geese.” “Clamor” is a violent, noisy word, and barnacle-geese are wild migratory birds, not garden ornaments. Their cries do not belong to respectability. It is as if the animal restlessness in the poem—the devils, the itch, the frenzy—returns in another form, at the very moment the dream tries to settle down.
What makes the poem significant is its comic honesty about human wishing. It shows a man trying to imagine a better life and discovering that his desires, fears, and body keep walking into the picture. The escape to sea air and a garden cannot happen because the beggar brings himself along. In five tightly wound stanzas, Yeats turns a would-be idyll into a small anatomy of appetite, vanity, and the wild noise that undoes our careful plans.