‘The Wild Swans at Coole’
The Swan
List all you know about the animal and its surrounding mythology
The Swan
Swans are a common symbol in poetry, often used to
depict idealised nature. Yeats employs this convention in
“The Wild Swans at Coole” (1919), in which the regal
birds represent an unchanging, flawless ideal. In “Leda
and the Swan,” Yeats rewrites the Greek myth of Zeus
and Leda to comment on fate and historical inevitability:
Zeus disguises himself as a swan to rape the
unsuspecting Leda. In this poem, the bird is fearsome and
destructive, and it possesses a divine power that violates
Leda and initiates the dire consequences of war and
devastation depicted in the final lines. Even though Yeats
clearly states that the swan is the god Zeus, he also
emphasizes the physicality of the swan: the beating
wings, the dark webbed feet, the long neck and beak.
Through this description of its physical characteristics,
the swan becomes a violent divine force. By rendering a
well-known poetic symbol as violent and terrifying rather
than idealized and beautiful, Yeats manipulates poetic
conventions, an act of literary modernism, and adds to
the power of the poem.
Memory
The past
History
Idealised nature
Coole Park
• Yeats first stayed at Coole Park,
County Galway in 1897
• at the time ‘involved in a
miserable love affair [with Maud
Gonne] that had but for one brief
interruption absorbed my
thoughts for years past, and
would for some years yet.’
• Swans did not nest at Coole Park,
the first time Yeats knew them to
do so was 30 years after his first
stay
Daniel Albright writes:
Swans are important in several of Yeats’ romantic or
elegiac poems, in Baile and Aillin two lovers
metamorphoses into swans, in The Tower the poet
sings his swan song, in Nineteen Hundred and
Nineteen a swan symbolises the human soul, in Coole
and Ballylee the poet sees a swan and exclaims
‘Another emblem there!’ – but an emblem of nothing
in particular. In this poem too there is a vague and
tantalizing intimacy between the poet and the swans,
as if the swans represent human souls or human
feelings liberated from mere flesh: ‘They’re but an
image on a lake’ wrote Yeats.
Annotations
• ‘water’ – as in many early poems, water is a medium for the
generation of images and as a metaphor for memory
• ‘mirror’ – the poem is governed by a structure of mirrorings.
• ‘they have flown away’ – Jeffares believes that Yeats
wrote ‘Wild Swans at Coole’ in a state of despair over his
inability to summon much feeling over Maud Gonne’s last
rejection of his proposal of marriage. The loss of feeling
corresponds to the coming absence of the swans: the swans
resemble the Moods, the exterior passions that inspires mankind
or fail to do so according to divine caprice. Beauty and passion
will exist, but will no longer have any relation to the poet. Levine
regards Yeats’ swan lyrics as stages in his exorcism of Maud
Gonne.
• http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/e
nglish_literature/poetryplace/thewildswansre
v2.shtml
Form (no of stanzas)
Rhyme (work out the scheme)
Rhythm (poetic meter)
Note:
• Trimeter (3)
• Tetrameter (4)
• Pentameter (5)
Language Analysis
Analyse the difference between the 2 options, how
does the effects acheived change?
1. ‘Upon the brimming water among the
stones’
Upon the rising water among the stones
2. ‘Upon their clamorous wings.’
Upon their noisy wings.
3. ‘The bell-beat of their wings above my
head’
The beat of their wings above my head
4. ‘Unwearied still, lover by lover’
Alert still, lovers
5. ‘To find they have flown away?’
To find they have flown away.
Analyse + Compare
(in contrast/similarly):
1. ‘And scatter wheeling in great rings’
‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre’ (The
Coming)
Second
2. ‘Their hearts have not grown old’
‘Hearts with one purpose alone’ (Easter
1916)
3. ‘But now they drift on the still water’
‘Where wandering water gushes’ (The
Stolen Child)