The Wild Swans at Coole

Composed by William Butler Yeats when he was already established as one of the most beloved poets in his native Ireland, “The Wild Swans at Coole” (1916) is a melancholic meditation on the transient nature of fragile humanity set against the apparent stability and permanence of nature itself. In a prolific career that spanned more than seven decades, “The Wild Swans at Coole” is still among Yeats’s most recognized and most anthologized poems.

Occasioned by the poet contemplating a gathering of swans along a lake at Coole Park in Galway, an Irish coastal town some two hours west of Dublin, the poem reflects Yeats’s growing anxieties over his own mortality and regrets over lost opportunities in life. In addition, the poem reflects Yeats’s broodings on Europe being embroiled in a massive (and apparently unending) war, as well as his own country’s doomed struggle for independence from Great Britain. In a world where everything keeps changing and time keeps passing, the poet finds reassurance in the idea that these “mysterious, beautiful” (Line 26) swans represent a kind of permanence unavailable to humanity.

The poem displays Yeats’s grounding in the conventional prosody of Romantic poetry of the 19th century (against the more daring experiments in form associated with the Modernists of his own era). Thematically, the poem ultimately affirms the power of art as beauty that lasts and design that does not collapse into chaos, offering a serenity that cannot be lost.

Poet Biography

William Butler Yeats (pronounced “Yates”) was born June 13, 1865, in Sandymount, a coastal suburb of Dublin along Dublin Bay in Ireland. His father, a prominent lawyer with ambitions to be a painter, raised Yeats with an appreciation for art. The young Yeats, shuttled back and forth from London because of his father’s work, identified fiercely with his Irish roots. In 1883, he began study at Dublin’s oldest and most prestigious art academy, the Metropolitan School of Art. Even as he studied art, however, he began writing short poems, publishing his first verses in 1885.

That same year, Yeats returned to London, determined to be a writer. In an era when science flourished and institutional religions seemed irrelevant, Yeats studied the arcane philosophical works of Plato and the visionary epics of the Romantic poet William Blake. Art, humane and idealistic, seemed the answer to an increasingly materialistic, depersonalized world driven by machines. For more than a decade, Yeats published poetry that reflected his faith in beauty as supreme and passionate.

During the 1890s, Yeats began to identify with the cause of Irish independence from England, compelled as much by his love of his Celtic heritage as by his quixotic passion for an Irish actress named Maud Gonne who championed Irish political freedom. Yeats contributed to a Dublin drama organization, later known as the Abbey Theatre, that commissioned new plays about Ireland, its people, and its folklore. During this time, Yeats met Augusta Lady Gregory, a playwright and a wealthy benefactor who supported the Irish Revival. Yeats often summered at Lady Gregory’s Galway estate named Coole Park.

By the time the Irish political uprising opposing British occupation failed during the short-lived Easter Rebellion in 1916, Yeats turned to faith in the arts, believing Irish freedom could best be achieved by its artists, not by its politicians. His writings began to explore abstract philosophical ideas about the nature of art, the viability of the soul, and the transcendent realm of ideas that might redeem the sordid material world. Beginning with the collection The Wild Swans at Coole (1917), Yeats published increasingly dense works that found an international readership. Yeats’s poetry boldly defined a metaphysical reality where art and imagination triumphed. This body of work led to his 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Now recognized as the foremost Irish writer of his era, Yeats died while wintering in Roquebrune, France, along the French Riviera, at the age of 73 in January 1939. With the outbreak of World War II, arrangements to have Yeats’s body returned to Ireland were delayed until 1948, when he was at last buried in a modest churchyard in Sligo, his mother’s hometown, along Ireland’s northwest coast.

Poem text

The trees are in their autumn beauty,

The woodland paths are dry,

Under the October twilight the water

Mirrors a still sky;

Upon the brimming water among the stones

Are nine-and-fifty swans.

The nineteenth autumn has come upon me

Since I first made my count;

I saw, before I had well finished,

All suddenly mount

And scatter wheeling in great broken rings

Upon their clamorous wings.

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,

And now my heart is sore.

All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,

The first time on this shore,

The bell-beat of their wings above my head,

Trod with a lighter tread.

Unwearied still, lover by lover,

They paddle in the cold

Companionable streams or climb the air;

Their hearts have not grown old;

Passion or conquest, wander where they will,

Attend upon them still.

But now they drift on the still water,

Mysterious, beautiful;

Among what rushes will they build,

By what lake’s edge or pool

Delight men’s eyes when I awake some day

To find they have flown away?

Yeats, William Butler. “The Wild Swans at Coole.” 1916. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

It is mid-fall, the dry season, late in the day. The title identifies the setting as Coole Park, a vast nature reserve located in western Ireland just outside the coastal town of Galway on the estate property of Augusta Lady Gregory (1852-1932), a playwright and long-time patron of Irish artists, among them William Butler Yeats. The poet/speaker wanders about the paths of the wooded park along the edges of a pond that “mirrors the still sky” (Line 4). There he watches elegant, stately swans paddle on the water. He counts them: 59.

In Stanza 2, the poet/speaker recalls how he visited the same park, the same lake, 19 years earlier. He remembers the sheer vitality and beauty of the great birds then and how, as he was just beginning to count the swans, they had suddenly broken into grand flight, free and exuberant, scattering, “wheeling in great broken rings” (Line 11).

The poet/speaker now realizes that seeing the swans again, still beautiful, still exuberant, fills him with bittersweet regrets: “[N]ow my heart is sore” (Line 14). He considers how much older he is and how everything has changed in his life over the 19 years since he first heard the “bell-beat” (Line 17) of these swans in flight.

Yet the swans appear impervious to time: “Unwearied” (Line 19), they paddle about the “cold / Companionable streams” (Lines 20-21) or take wing just as they did 19 years earlier. Although in the same time the poet/speaker has experienced the joys and pains of lovers that have left his heart aching, the swans have maintained a constant presence: “Their hearts have not grown old” (Line 22), implying that in the same space of time, the poet/speaker’s own heart has grown old. Nothing, neither “passion or conquest” (Line 23), that is to say neither love or its loss, has impacted the swans. Unlike the poet/speaker, who is locked in time and registers its impact, the swans seem to maintain their magisterial presence year after year, season after season. Nature seems to endure as humanity is forever in flux.

In the closing stanza, the poet/speaker contemplates the swans now on the lake, “mysterious, beautiful” (Line 26) much as they were years earlier. He wonders where the great birds will fly to build their nests, whether along the lake’s edges or back in the shallow eddies of quieter water, the lake’s pools. He wonders whether there may come a day when he finds the swans have flown away, left never to return. That would be devastating. He would lose the reassuring stability they represent so elegantly in a manic world of constant change and chaos.