In W. B. Yeats’s “Running to Paradise,” the speaker is a wandering beggar who has made a vocation of movement. From the first line he is crossing Windy Gap, where people toss a halfpenny into his cap or hand him “a bit of salted fish.” He does not beg as a misfortune but as a kind of trust: “all that I need do is to wish,” he says, and help appears. The central idea is already in the refrain that ends each stanza: “And there the king is but as the beggar.” Paradise is a place where human rankings collapse, and the way toward it is not accumulation but release.
Each stanza sets that release against a different form of entrapment. The second stanza gives us the brother Mourteen, worn out from “skelping his big brawling lout,” yet still keeping “a dog and a gun, / A serving maid and a serving man.” Those possessions sound like a list of status, but the speaker calls the whole arrangement “a poor life.” The third stanza swings through fortune: “Poor men have grown to be rich men, / And rich men grown to be poor again,” while a once lively schoolchild has grown dull and “filled an old sock full” of saved money. In every case, owning, keeping, and protecting deaden the spirit. The speaker answers each example with the same line: “And I am running to Paradise.”
The form is as simple and memorable as a ballad. Four seven-line stanzas repeat a pattern: a vigorous opening couplet or image, the speaker’s refrain, a small cluster of examples, then the leveling statement about king and beggar. The rhymes feel oral and quick—Gap/cap, wish/dish/fish, out/lout, play/way. The mixed rhythm prevents the poem from becoming mechanical; it can bound through “They threw a halfpenny into my cap” and then slow for the grave reversal of rich and poor. The diction is deliberately homely. Words such as cap, dish, sock, dog, gun, lout, and wind keep paradise grounded in ordinary textures rather than cloud-like abstraction.
The most telling image is the wind. It appears first as the name of the opening place, Windy Gap, and returns in the last stanza as a friend: “The wind is old and still at play / While I must hurry upon my way.” Unlike the brother’s servants or the hoarder’s sock, the wind “nobody can buy or bind.” That line is the heart of the poem. The speaker has not found any human or possession that satisfies as the wind does, because the wind is free, ancient, and unownable.
What makes “Running to Paradise” significant is its understated radicalism. It takes a tramp’s voice and a folk-like refrain and uses them to overturn social common sense. The king and the beggar are not made equal after death; they are equal “there,” in the present, whenever the soul is freed from owning and being owned. The poem’s spiritual ideal is not a majestic heaven but a road, a cap, a wish, and a wind that cannot be held.