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.
Themes
The Permanence of Nature
The poet/speaker, his life so dramatically altered across the close to two decades since his last visit to the lake at Coole Park, marvels at the permanence of the park’s landscape: the shimmering lake, the “still” sky (Line 4), the trees.
It is obviously a tender, romantic illusion. After all, the poet/speaker moves about the park at the approach of twilight on a mid-autumn afternoon, both reminders that this supposedly fixed nature is in constant flux, forever moving day to night, autumn to winter. This is reflected in the poet/speaker’s meditation on these 59 swans that so mesmerize him—19 years later, these same swans paddle about the lake, despite common sense saying that, given the swans’ limited life span in the wild (on average 12 years) these are not, cannot be, the same swans.
Nature’s permanence then is an idea to which the poet/speaker clings given the melancholy evidence all about him, outside the refuge of this park, of the world’s impermanence, its inclination to chaos and confusion. He relishes the idea of nature’s permanence: “All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight / The first time on this shore / The bell-beat of their wings above my head” (Lines 15-17). The closing stanza reflects this need when the poet/speaker asks rhetorically what would happen if the park, the lake, the swans themselves surrendered to flux and went away. That question reflects the poet/speaker’s need to take refuge in the philosophical idea that nature is a reliable constant in a manic and terrifying universe of change.
The Impact of Time
At the dark emotional core of William Butler Yeats’s meditation on the swans of Coole Park is time. The poet/speaker is exact in his measuring of time: It has been 19 years since he first visited the park. He implies that this may well be the first time he has walked along the lake in all that time. So much has changed in his life—although he does not itemize the events. He suggests only that his heart has been wearied “lover by lover” (Line 19).
Nineteen years in nature is nothing, but 19 years in an era where life expectancy at birth averaged just under 50 years represents a major part, almost half, of the poet/speaker’s life narrative. So much changes in a person’s life over such a span of time. It is the impact of time that creates the melancholy mood of the poem. The poet/speaker is helpless to stop time’s movement. Unlike nature, which seems impervious to time’s impact, moving day to day, year to year without reflecting the impact of time, the poet/speaker ruminates on how much he has changed across the decades since he first watched the swans make their slow circles in the “still sky” (Line 4). He surmises as he watches the swans paddle about the lake that their hearts have “not grown old” (Line 22).
The poet/speaker refuses to indulge sentimental cliches about making the most of what time a person is given, to live heroically in every moment, nor does he couch his observations about the tyranny of time in comforting assurances of some mythical afterlife. Rather, the poem closes with the poet/speaker recording the “mysterious, beautiful” (Line 26) swans, drifting so casually on the lake, and their ability, collectively, to resist the impact of time that has so devastated him.
The Consolation of Art
It is easy to overlook the powerful affirmation that energizes a poem that seems, at first read, to be so gloomy. After all, the speaker admits his heart has been wounded. He moves about the lake’s edge alone, full of pessimistic observations about the beauty and grace of nature set against his own imperfect life of sorrow and loss. The poem argues that it would be nice if people were just swans, forever majestic, untroubled by the tragedies of love, and, as a result, apparently able to defy time itself.
But the swans are hardly consolation. In their grace and beauty, they taunt the speaker, remind him of the harshness of his real-time life narrative. The swans, however, hardly defy time. They move through seasons and surrender inevitably to mortality.
In the end, the poem itself offers what the swans (and nature) cannot: genuine immortality. The swans come and go, just like people, but when apprehended by the creative mind and grasping imagination of Yeats, those swans become a symbol. Elevated to the carefully crafted lines of the poem itself, the swans (and the speaker’s fleeting moment of realization there at the lake’s edge) tap into a splendid kind of permanence. The moment becomes a poem that, now, more than a century later, endures.
Art then is the answer to the unsettling rhetorical question that closes the poem. The poet/speaker ponders what happens if, sometime, someday, he returns to the park and the swans are gone, themselves surrendered to the grind of change. The poem, in answer, suggests that nothing happens to them—those swans have found their way into the immortality of artistic creativity. Swans come and go; poets come and go. Poems endure.
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
