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.