W.B' Yeats' “The Wild Swans at Coole”
Summary
With the trees “in their autumn beauty,” the
speaker walks down the dry woodland paths to the water, which mirrors the still
October twilight of the sky. Upon the water float “nine-and-fifty swans.” The
speaker says that nineteen years have passed since he first came to the water
and counted the swans; that first time, before he had “well finished,” he saw
the swans mount up into the sky and scatter, “whelling in great broken rings /
Upon their clamorous wings.” The speaker says that his heart is sore, for after
nineteen autumns of watching and being cheered by the swans, he finds that
everything in his life has changed. The swans, though, are still unwearied, and
they paddle by in the water or fly by in the air in pairs, “lover by lover.”
Their hearts, the speaker says, “have not grown cold,” and wherever they go
they are attended by “passion or conquest.” But now, as they drift over the
still water, they are “Mysterious, beautiful,” and the speaker wonders where
they will build their nests, and by what lake’s edge or pool they will “delight
men’s eyes,” when he awakes one morning to find that they have flown away.
Form
“The Wild
Swans at Coole” is written in a very regular stanza form: five six-line
stanzas, each written in a roughly iambic meter, with the first and third lines
in tetrameter, the second, fourth, and sixth lines in trimeter, and the fifth
line in pentameter, so that the pattern of stressed syllables in each stanza is
434353. The rhyme scheme in each stanza is
ABCBDD.
Commentary
One of the most unusual features of Yeats’s
poetic career is the fact that the poet came into his greatest powers only as
he neared old age; whereas many poets fade after the first burst of youth,
Yeats continued to grow more confident and more innovative with his writing
until almost the day he died. Though he was a famous and successful writer in
his youth, his poetic reputation today is founded almost solely on poems
written after he was fifty. He is thus the great poet of old age, writing
honestly and with astonishing force about the pain of time’s passage and
feeling that the ageless heart was “fastened to a dying animal,” as he wrote in
“Sailing to Byzantium.” The great struggle that enlivens many of Yeats’s best
poems is the struggle to uphold the integrity of the soul, and to preserve the
mind’s connection to the “deep heart’s core,” despite physical decay and the
pain of memory.
“The Wild Swans at Coole,” part of the 1919 collection of the same name, is one of Yeats’s
earliest and most moving testaments to the heart-ache of living in a time when
“all’s changed.” (And when Yeats says “All’s changed, changed utterly” in the
fifteen years since he first saw the swans, he means it—the First World War and
the Irish civil war both occurred during these years.) The simple narrative of
the poem, recounting the poet’s trips to the lake at Augusta Gregory’s Coole
Park residence to count the swans on the water, is given its solemn serenity by
the beautiful nature imagery of the early stanzas, the plaintive tone of the
poet, and the carefully constructed poetic stanza—the two trimeter lines, which
give the poet an opportunity to utter short, heartfelt statements before a long
silence ensured by the short line (“Their hearts have not grown old...”). The
speaker, caught up in the gentle pain of personal memory, contrasts sharply
with the swans, which are treated as symbols of the essential: their hearts
have not grown old; they are still attended by passion and conquest.
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