The Wild Swans at Coole (1919 collection)
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?
William Butler Yeats wrote this poem, “The Wild Swans at Coole”, in October 1916. He published it in The Little Review in June 1917, and in the same year included it in a poetry collection, also entitled The Wild Swans of Coole and published by Cuala Press, a small Irish publishing house run by his sister Elisabeth Yeats. The timing and location is important. Yeats’s poem was written in the same year as the Easter Rising when Ireland was taking her first steps towards independence. Coole, the location for the “Wild Swans”, was the home of Yeats’s friend Lady Augusta Gregory, one of the many estates of the Protestant ascendant class, and vulnerable in the emerging political landscape in Ireland. Yeats was 51 when he wrote “The Wild Swans at Coole”, and his long held obsession with Maud Gonne was drawing toward a conclusion. By the end of 1917, Yeats would have offered a last desperate proposal to Maud Gonne and been refused, he would have proposed to her daughter Iseult and also been refused, and he would marry Georgie Hyde-Lees. These three concerns, Ireland, Coole Park, and Maud Gonne, are all treated in Yeats’s poem, “The Wild Swans at Coole”.
In a general sense, there is an atmosphere of long attendance in the poem, broken by a sudden and uncontrollable disturbance. “I have looked upon those brilliant creatures”, almost twenty years are spent studying, watching over, and admiring the swans and “The nineteenth autumn has come upon me/Since I first made my count”. Now, before time, “before I am well finished” there is an event of sudden disruption as the swans “scatter wheeling in great broken rings”. Yeats would again use the image of circling birds in his 1920 poem, “The Second Coming”, in which the “Reel[ing] shadows of the indignant desert birds” portend a deepening crisis, a moment when “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”. At this stage in his life we know Yeats has been in long and frequent attendance at Coole Park. He has long nurtured the Irish literary and national movement, and adored Maud Gonne.
The crisis that coincides with the writing of the poem is the 1916 Easter Rising. Yeats’s allusion to the disturbing political atmosphere as Ireland slides from failed rebellion into the Irish war for Independence is offered in “All’s changed” echoed again in his poem “Easter 1916”: “All changed, changed utterly:/ a terrible beauty is born”. But what of the fate of Coole in the future Ireland? Here is a place of establishment: a space where swans come year after year, and in long tradition Yeats believed a place for elegance and nurturing:
How should the world be luckier if this house,
Where passion and precision have been one
Time out of mind become too ruinous
To breed the lidless eye that loved the sun? (“Upon a House Shaken by the Land Agitation” 1910)
The crisis represented in the “Easter 1916” poem is tied to Coole Park. He uses the phrase “All’s changed” in both, but in the “Wild Swans” poem change is tied specifically to the elegance represented by the swans and by extension to their home in Coole Park. Yeats’s concern with the fate of Ireland and Coole Park are bound into each other.
Yeats’s second obsession in this poem is with Maud Gonne. He had often compared his dreams of a relationship between himself and Gonne to that of a pair of birds: “I would that we were my beloved, white birds on the foam of the sea” (“The White Birds” (1892). The “Wild Swans” poem begins with an Autumn scene and therefore a fruitful or a dying scene. Things would come to a crisis and/or would end. Yeats and Maud Gonne have both reach middle age and his long passion for her remained unrequited to the extent that he would have wished. It must have been a lonely thing to watch the pairs of swans return year after year together to Coole. The poet remembers when he “Trod with a lighter tread”, when no doubt he first had hopes, and now his “heart is sore”. He looks on while the swans:
Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Passion or conquest , wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.
Despite changing time and place and whether because of passion or conquest, the swans remain together. For the poet, in contrast to the swans, enduring love for Maud Gonne had grown a bitter fruit, and he stands on the shore, a lonely observer of steadfast couples.
In the concluding stanza Yeats’s love theme and concern for Coole Park are drawn together. “Among what rushes will they build,/By what lake’s edge or pool” announces a departure for the swans, the elegance they represent, and the love between them. He has woken in a new dawn in Ireland, a new world is emerging, and he realises that for him, after nearly twenty years of love, and twenty years of shelter in the world of the old Irish ascendency class in Coole Park, an era has come to an end, “they have flown away” to become the “delight” of others.
Dr. Bernie McCarthy
westcorkcollegewords 