READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM: Brown Penny by William Butler Yeats

Reader-response theory recognizes the reader as an active agent who imparts "real existence" to the work and completes its meaning through interpretation. Reader-response criticism argues that literature should be viewed as a performing art in which each reader creates his or her own, possibly unique, text-related performance. It stands in total opposition to the theories of formalism and the New Criticism, in which the reader's role in re-creating literary works is ignored. New Criticism had emphasized that only that which is within a text is part of the meaning of a text. No appeal to the authority or intention of the author, nor to the psychology of the reader, was allowed in the discussions of orthodox New Critics.



The Text:

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.

(from:http://gardezi.tigblog.org/post/175271)



The Criticism:


The narrator of the poem is a young man who is infatuated of a young lady, who is probably experiencing his first love and unsure if he should approach the young lady or not. So to make up his mind, he flips a coin to decide, and presumably the coin told him to go to her and love her: "Go and love, go and love, young man,/If the lady be young and fair." at the same time the penny is the made the decision final yet he is still uncertain.

 The poem uses repetition to give it a tone, repeating the line "Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny" as well as "Go and love, go and love" to emphasize the message.
The brown penny in the poem represents an oracle and a subconscious choice of the lover to love which he found difficult that he had to flip a coin for it. And lastly, "I am looped in the loops of her hair." represents the attraction and entanglements of love itself.

To sum up all, the poem is about making a hard decision and letting fate decide.