The Wild Swans at Coole

Undeniably, William Butler Yeats, the presumptive speaker in the poem, is sad. It is autumn, late in the day, and he is feeling his age. He is outside and chilled, and more important, looking back over his long life, he is suddenly full of regrets, his heart “sore” (Line 14). Nature, embodied by the park’s herd of swans, seems ever animated and ever robust despite the October chill. And those swans paddling absently about the cold lake seem happily indifferent to his broodings.

Yet there is a kind of gorgeous majesty to Yeats’s melancholy, a kind of giddy egotism about his pensiveness. Yes, he is past 50 at a time when that was considered old age. Yet, as he notes along the lake at Coole Park, given the beauty and grace of the swans, still there after 19 years, he cannot help but feel vulnerable, fragile. However, in following the line of argument of Yeats’s meditation, stanza to stanza, the poem offers a sweeping counterargument that climaxes in the closing stanza’s rhetorical question, a question that ultimately empowers Yeats the poet, if not Yeats the man.

It is important first to note that in 1916 when Yeats first drafted the poem, he was, to be generous, considered a minor poet, known mostly in Ireland, a marginal figure in the rediscovery of Irish culture and heritage that blossomed in Ireland in the latter decades of the 19th century, a cultural movement called by its most passionate advocates the Celtic Revival. Yeats had contributed some minor plays that drew on Irish folktales and several collections of Romantic lyric poetry that celebrated the verdant Irish countryside. Yeats’s most important work, however, was still ahead, the body of mystical, spiritual verse that explored the power of art and the near-religious calling of the artist, work that would secure for him international acclaim and the Nobel Prize.

This then is not a swaggering poem of a young man, but it is hardly the melancholy work of a dying man either. “The Wild Swans at Coole” is no lion-in-the-winter lamentation, no self-directed elegy. Rather, it is the work of a poet just coming into his powers. The poem ultimately asks the reader which they would rather be: a swan, beautiful, perhaps, graceful, certainly, but still a creature who knows neither “passion or conquest” (Line 23) and who knows only to eat, sleep, paddle about, occasionally fly, and make baby swans; or a man, hobbled by the years, edging into bitterness, and looking backward with regret and tears; or would they rather be the poet, confident and calm, observing it all, whose grasping eye, restless imagination, and skillful artisanship forges artifacts that capture both the birds and those regrets and tears. Those artifacts, in turn, defy time itself.

In this, the poem builds to answering the anything-but-rhetorical question posed in the closing stanza: What happens, the poet asks, when the swans are gone? The answer is the poem itself happens. The poem records the ebb and flow of an old man who in the end realizes the power and glory of the artist, a realization that sets the soaring, affirmative tone for the next 20 years of what would become Yeats’s defining works.

The poem’s first two stanzas suggest the depth of sadness that defines Yeats the man. As he walks about the park, he is stunned by the “autumn beauty” (Line 1) of the woods in October, in sorry comparison to his shabby physical bearing in his own autumnal years. But beauty is not the only thing the man envies about nature. He spies the “nine-and-fifty swans” paddling about the “brimming water” (Line 5) of the lake just as they were doing 19 years ago when he first visited the park. He remembers way back then how, when he had come upon the swans, they scattered in flight, “wheeling in great broken rings” (Line 11), a memory of unexpected beauty that he cherishes.

However, he fails to see the implications of his own memory, how the memory of those swans 19 years ago is still fresh, alive, animated, and vivid in his mind. Rather than see the power he has, in Stanza 3, he indulges self-pity: “[M]y heart is sore” (Line 14) because “all’s changed since” that moment. Here he stands, older, wearied by time, wounded by the heart’s ironies and agonies, its joys and sorrow, while these birds have lived in quiet and perfect absoluteness. Now their beauty only reminds the man of his own deterioration, his own slow surrender to time. Back then, he ruefully acknowledges, he was a much younger man and walked with a much “lighter tread” (Line 18).

Had the poem closed there, the poem would have been recognized by Irish readers in 1916 as typical Yeats: lyrical and sweet, a bit sentimental, a bit maudlin. But the poem does not end there. In Stanza 4, the man Yeats becomes the poet Yeats, and the poet Yeats begins to realize what the maudlin, self-pitying man does not realize: the magnificent and timeless power of art.

The tipping-point moment comes quietly, unobtrusively in Line 22: “Their hearts have not grown old.” From an ornithologist’s point of view, the observation is patently absurd. Birds are born, they live, they grow old, and their hearts age along with the rest of their bodies. That is not heart the poet considers. Rather, it is the heart that loves, the heart that experiences “passion and conquest” (Line 22). That heart, in the human, does grow old, does experience the happiness and the sorrows, does feel and remember those moments. Unlike the swans, beautiful though they may be, they “wander where they will” (Line 23), unable, really uninterested in passion and conquests. Rather, they simply are, until they are not. They simply “paddle about the cold / Companionable streams or climb the air” (Lines 20-21). They are, in the end, just birds.

In the closing stanza, Yeats the poet roars into his command. Melancholy gives way to exaltation. Yes, his heart is sore and bandaged. Thankfully, he is no swan. Birds mate blindly because their species refuses to accept extinction. The man loved, sometimes conquered, sometimes lost, but he loved.

While that is the stuff of romantic regret, the closing stanza affirms what Yeats the poet celebrates. What happens, the poet asks, if someday these swans that so delight my eye fly away? The poem teeters on despair until the poet asserts the answer to such despair: Nothing will happen because the poet willed this poem into existence. If Yeats the man suffered—and he did, as everyone does—Yeats the poet shapes from that suffering the stuff of art, a poem that is at once gorgeous and immortal. That is the power of the artist.