my offering for St. Patrick's day

Brown Penny
-William Butler Yeats

I whispered, 'I am too young,'
And then, 'I am old enough';
Wherefore I threw a penny
To find out if I might love.
'Go and love, go and love, young man,
If the lady be young and fair.'
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
I am looped in the loops of her hair.

O love is the crooked thing,
There is nobody wise enough
To find out all that is in it,
For he would be thinking of love
Till the stars had run away
And the shadows eaten the moon.
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
One cannot begin it too soon.

Lucky Irishman that I am, I love my wife (and she-of-the-clover loves me).

Update: here's something found online at MEaning of WB YEats Brown penny

Yeats is one of the most important English language poets of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and yet he is not typical of the period. Most poets in the language were moving toward free verse, but Yeats took a very traditionalist view of how poetry ought to be learned. The tradition of the ancient Irish was that to be a bard, a singer of verse, one had first to master all of the verse forms known to bards, and go into the wild places, living from hand to mouth, exposed to elements, to truly feel nature and to compose from one's feelings.

Yeats grew up in a wildly beautiful part of the Island, in County Mayo, and rambled there and in County Sligo. At one time, as a young man, he did ramble about the countryside in all weather, composing verse aloud as he sat beneath the dripping bush.

Brown Penny is not the work of the young Yeats, however--he wrote it in middle age. But as he grew older, he wrote more austere, more sparse verse, and became even more dedicated to verse form and traditional rhyming. In that respect, he moved farther from the poets of his generation.

Brown Penny is about love, and the welter of emotions which it engenders in the young man's heart. Joy, dismay, fear, wonder, doubt--and he has woven all of those into this brief poem. The old penny of the United Kingdom was a large brown coin, and had symbolic meaning to the common folk. One of those meanings was love, that love was something priceless, to which no mere material value could be attached. Although not understood today, that symbolism survives in the expression "a penny for your thoughts," which originally was used to indicate to the person spoken to that deep emotion motivated the question.

Brown Penny should be viewed as a song more than a poem, and a whirling dance of a song at that. Imagine the poet so immersed in his love and the conflicting emotional responses to which it gives rise, whirling in a dance, a reel, in which he is "looped" in the hair of his lover, both literally and fiburatively, and wrapped ever more securely in the emotions which have gripped him. If you can, sing the poem to yourself, and think of the twirling Irish dance known as the reel. It is quite a marvelous work of poetry, and very much in the ancient Irish spirit of acheiving freedom within the bounds of form.

That seems pretty much to the point.