The Wild Swans at Coole (poem)

Poem by W. B. Yeats

The Wild Swans at Coole (1917)">

by William Butler Yeats
Written| 1916–1917
First published in| The Wild Swans at Coole (1917, 1919)
Meter| iambic, in six-line stanzas of tetrameter (lines 1 and 3), trimeter (lines 2, 4, and 6), and pentameter (lines 5)
Rhyme scheme| ABCBDD
Publication date| 1917 (1917)
Lines| 30
Full text
The Wild Swans at Coole (Collection) at Wikisource
William Butler Yeats

"The Wild Swans at Coole" is a lyric poem by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats (1865–1939). Written between 1916 and early 1917, the poem was first published in the June 1917 issue of the Little Review, and became the title poem in the Yeats's 1917 and 1919 collections The Wild Swans at Coole.

It was written during a period when Yeats was staying with his friend Lady Gregory at her home at Coole Park, and the assembled collection was dedicated to her son, Major Robert Gregory (1881–1918), a British airman killed during a friendly fire incident in the First World War. Literary scholar Daniel Tobin writes that Yeats was melancholy and unhappy, reflecting on his advancing age, romantic rejections by both Maud Gonne and her daughter Iseult Gonne, and the ongoing Irish rebellion against the British. Tobin reflects that the poem is about the poet's search for a lasting beauty in a changing world where beauty is mortal and temporary.[1]

## Style and structure

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The poem has a very regular stanza form: five six-line stanzas, each written in a roughly iambic meter, with the first and third lines in tetrameter, the second, fourth, and sixth lines in trimeter, and the fifth line in pentameter, so that the pattern of stressed syllables in each stanza is 434353. The rhyme scheme in each stanza is ABCBDD.

## Poem

[edit]

> 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?[2]

## Popular culture

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In his LP Branduardi canta Yeats (1986), Angelo Branduardi sings an Italian version (I Cigni di Coole) of this poem.

## See also

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* 1917 in poetry
* 1919 in poetry

## References

[edit]

1. ^ Tobin, Daniel E. “Yeats’s Personal Utterance in ‘The Wild Swans at Coole.’” Yeats Eliot Review, (11:3), Summer 1992, 57-63.
2. ^ Yeats, William Butler, "The Wild Swans at Coole", The Wild Swans at Coole (New York/London: Macmillan and Company, 1919), 1–3.

## External links

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* The collected public domain poetry of Yeats as an eBook at Standard Ebooks
* "The Wild Swans at Coole" at the Poetry Foundation website
* "The Wild Swans at Coole" at Project Gutenberg
* "The Wild Swans at Coole" at Irish Around The World
* "Mr Yeats' ardent new poems" (review) in The Manchester Guardian, Sunday 6 April 1919

* v
* t
* e

W. B. Yeats

Poetry|

| Volumes|

* The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889)
* The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (1892)
* In the Seven Woods (1903)
* Responsibilities and Other Poems (1916)
* The Wild Swans at Coole (1919)
* Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921)
* The Tower (1928)
* The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)

|

Poems|

* "Adam's Curse"
* "Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven"
* "Blood and the Moon"
* "The Circus Animals' Desertion"
* "Down by the Salley Gardens"
* "A Drunken Man's Praise of Sobriety"
* "Easter, 1916"
* "Ego Dominus Tuus"
* "The Fiddler of Dooney"
* "The Gift of Harun Al-Raschid"
* "In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz"
* "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death"
* "The Lake Isle of Innisfree"
* "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen"
* "On being asked for a War Poem"
* "Politics"
* "A Prayer for My Daughter"
* "Remorse for Intemperate Speech"
* "The Rose of Battle"
* "The Rose-Tree"
* "Sailing to Byzantium"
* "The Scholars"
* "The Second Coming"
* "September 1913"
* "The Song of the Happy Shepherd"
* "Song of the Old Mother"
* "The Song of Wandering Aengus"
* "The Stolen Child"
* "Swift's Epitaph"
* "To the Rose upon the Rood of Time"
* "The Tower"
* "Under Ben Bulben"
* "The Wanderings of Oisin"
* "The Wild Swans at Coole"

Plays|

* Mosada (1886)
* The Land of Heart's Desire (1894)
* Diarmuid and Grania (1901)
* Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902)
* On Baile's Strand (1903)
* The Countess Cathleen (1911)
* At the Hawk's Well (1916)
* The Resurrection (1927)
* Purgatory (1938)

Other works|

* The Works of William Blake: Poetic, Symbolic and Critical (1893; co-author)
* A Vision (1925)
* The Bounty of Sweden (1925)
* "The Curse of the Fires and of the Shadows"
* Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892–1935 (editor)

People|

* Georgie Hyde-Lees (wife)
* Anne Yeats (daughter)
* Michael Yeats (son)
* John Butler Yeats (father)
* Susan Pollexfen (mother)
* Jack Butler Yeats (brother)
* Elizabeth Yeats (sister)
* Lily Yeats (sister)
* Maud Gonne (muse)

Related|

* W. B. Yeats bibliography
* Rhymers' Club
* Dun Emer Press
* Cuala Press
* An Appointment with Mr Yeats
* "Troy"
* Thoor Ballylee
* Samhain magazine
* The Speckled Bird

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