Commentary Wild Swans at Coole

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...