19 pages • 38 minutes read
The Wild Swans at Coole
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Wild Swans
The swans that the poet/speaker watches along the lake in the park symbolize the power of otherwise unremarkable objects to spark the poet’s imagination. These “brilliant creatures” (Line 13), at once “mysterious” and “beautiful” (Line 26), are common swans that live in this park and in many other parks in Ireland and around the world. They are swans—that is critical to the argument of the poem. This is no lofty metaphysical meditation. The swans are there, on that lake, and the poet strolls along that lake and sees the birds.
Yet, without warning and without the poet’s intrusive interpretation, they effortlessly become the occasion of the poet’s ruminations and, in turn, create the conditions under which the poem itself comes into being. As such, the swans of Coole Park symbolize the poet’s muse, a term that refers to the interactive spark between the artist and the real-time world. Suddenly, quietly, that world or some element of it inspires the artist to create, to fashion an object that both reflects that interaction and elevates it to the status of art.
In turn, the artist, driven by this unanticipated reaction to the muse, transforms (or perhaps distills more accurately reflects the interaction) that same real-time presence into the gift of insight. The poet offers wisdom about the unstoppable push of time, an insight that can be shared even by those who have never walked along the lake’s edge in Galway or those who have never even seen a swan.
Autumn
The poem is set in autumn, specifically in October. Much about the poem’s tone suggests gloomy melancholy as the poet contemplates the reality of how time passes and how vulnerable people are locked in the inevitable decline as years move. Yet William Butler Yeats sets the poem not in the stark chill of November or in the cold dead of winter but rather in the dazzling “beauty” (Line 1) of autumn. Nor does the poet set the poem in the romantic energy of spring or in the giddy romp of summer. It is autumn—and the poet uses the season to offer hope.
If autumn symbolizes time itself, it offers a strategy for optimism. In a poem otherwise mourning the ravages of time, autumn symbolizes a tempered kind of optimism, the determination of the poet to accept time and still not to hiss away into old age. It is not winter yet. The park, ablaze with “autumn beauty” (Line 1), consoles the poet/speaker even as he considers how much time has passed since he last watched the swans. Autumn encourages the poet/speaker to embrace the life he still has and the chance to still live brightly and gorgeously.
Numbers
In a poem that so happily shares the emotional musings of a poet/speaker inspired unexpectedly by a gathering of wild swans, the poem rests on two oddly specific numbers. The poet/speaker says not that it has been some time since he visited Coole Park and watched the swans, but rather that it has been 19 years “since [he] first made [his] count” (Line 8). And then he insists on patiently, methodically counting those swans, not content to call it a “bevy” or a “flock” or a “wedge” (the term for lots of swans). Rather, he itemizes the birds, counts them each until he is satisfied that he knows exactly how many swans paddle about the still lake in the park. Those numbers seem to resist the poet’s inclination to contemplate, to drop the anchorage in real-time and soar into the open horizon available to the artist.
That inclination to numbers is strikingly at odds with the poet/speaker’s gift for the emotional and the philosophical. Why at such curious moments does the poet turn suddenly mathematician?
The real-time world of clocks and calendars cannot simply be wished away. Numbers symbolize the real-time world that oppresses the poet/speaker, who contemplates how much his heart hurts from all that has happened to him over the years, how “all’s changed” (Line 15) since last he watched the birds. Numbers here are the enemy. They fix the poet/speaker into an ever-diminishing real-time world in which people are born, grow old, and then die. Specific and concrete, numbers symbolize the unsettling metrics of the tawdry world that the imagination, creativity, and art in turn sumptuously, gloriously defy.
Unlock all 19 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features:
Related Titles
By William Butler Yeats
