‘The Wild Swans at Coole’

The SwanList all you know about the animal and its surrounding

mythology

The SwanSwans are a common symbol in poetry, often used to depict idealised nature. Yeats employs this convention in “The Wild Swans at Coole” (1919), in which the regal birds represent an unchanging, flawless ideal. In “Leda and the Swan,” Yeats rewrites the Greek myth of Zeus and Leda to comment on fate and historical inevitability: Zeus disguises himself as a swan to rape the unsuspecting Leda. In this poem, the bird is fearsome and destructive, and it possesses a divine power that violates Leda and initiates the dire consequences of war and devastation depicted in the final lines. Even though Yeats clearly states that the swan is the god Zeus, he also emphasizes the physicality of the swan: the beating wings, the dark webbed feet, the long neck and beak. Through this description of its physical characteristics, the swan becomes a violent divine force. By rendering a well-known poetic symbol as violent and terrifying rather than idealized and beautiful, Yeats manipulates poetic conventions, an act of literary modernism, and adds to the power of the poem.

MemoryThe pastHistoryIdealised nature

Coole Park

• Yeats first stayed at Coole Park, County Galway in 1897

• at the time ‘involved in a miserable love affair [with Maud Gonne] that had but for one brief interruption absorbed my thoughts for years past, and would for some years yet.’

• Swans did not nest at Coole Park, the first time Yeats knew them to do so was 30 years after his first stay

Daniel Albright writes:

Swans are important in several of Yeats’ romantic or elegiac poems, in Baile and Aillin two lovers metamorphoses into swans, in The Tower the poet sings his swan song, in Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen a swan symbolises the human soul, in Coole and Ballylee the poet sees a swan and exclaims ‘Another emblem there!’ – but an emblem of nothing in particular. In this poem too there is a vague and tantalizing intimacy between the poet and the swans, as if the swans represent human souls or human feelings liberated from mere flesh: ‘They’re but an image on a lake’ wrote Yeats.

Annotations• ‘water’ – as in many early poems, water is a medium

for the generation of images and as a metaphor for memory

• ‘mirror’ – the poem is governed by a structure of mirrorings.

• ‘they have flown away’ – Jeffares believes that Yeats wrote ‘Wild Swans at Coole’ in a state of despair over his inability to summon much feeling over Maud Gonne’s last rejection of his proposal of marriage. The loss of feeling corresponds to the coming absence of the swans: the swans resemble the Moods, the exterior passions that inspires mankind or fail to do so according to divine caprice. Beauty and passion will exist, but will no longer have any relation to the poet. Levine regards Yeats’ swan lyrics as stages in his exorcism of Maud Gonne.

• http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/english_literature/poetryplace/thewildswansrev2.shtml

Form (no of stanzas)Rhyme (work out the scheme)

Rhythm (poetic meter)

Note:• Trimeter (3)• Tetrameter (4)• Pentameter (5)

Language AnalysisAnalyse the difference between the 2 options, how

does the effects acheived change?

1. ‘Upon the brimming water among the stones’

Upon the rising water among the stones2. ‘Upon their clamorous wings.’Upon their noisy wings.3. ‘The bell-beat of their wings above my head’The beat of their wings above my head4. ‘Unwearied still, lover by lover’Alert still, lovers 5. ‘To find they have flown away?’To find they have flown away.

Analyse + Compare (in contrast/similarly):

1. ‘And scatter wheeling in great rings’

‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre’ (The Second Coming)

2. ‘Their hearts have not grown old’

‘Hearts with one purpose alone’ (Easter 1916)3. ‘But now they drift on the still water’

‘Where wandering water gushes’ (The Stolen Child)