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The Wild Swans at Coole
FORM AND
STRUCTURE

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IambicPentameter
Written in regular stanza form
ABCBDD Rhyme Scheme
Enjambment and undulating lines convey the ripples in the water
Melancholic tone – sombre but serenic

CONTEXT

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Coole Park was Lady Gregory’s stately home
Written in 1915 when Yeats turned 50, the poem is an elegy for lost youth
He visited Coole Park nineteen years before in 1896
Wild swans are a symbol of the timeless, eternal beauty of the aristocratic way of
life threatened by the post war world
Yeats was influenced by the symbolist moment and said this poem was to
‘prolong the moment of contemplation’

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THEMES

QUOTES
AND
ANALYSIS

Nature
‘Mirrors a still sky;’
- Metaphor for how the lake
reflects the sky
‘Under the October twilight’
- Twilight has romantic
connotations, setting a
picturesque scene
‘The nineteenth autumn has come
upon me Since I first made my
count;’
- ‘Nineteenth autumn’
suggests a fixation with
this season, Autumn is
when Coole Park is at the
height of its beauty
- People count to organise,
but these swans cant be
controlled, they scatter
- Its impossible to keep
things static as nature
cant be controlled
‘The first time on this shore’
- Suggests a larger expanse
of land, the small moment
seems very significant to

Ageing/Time
‘Under the October twilight’
- Yeats is in the twilight of his life
‘The woodland paths are dry’
- Image of Yeats edging towards the end of
his fertility ‘dry’
‘Nine-and-fifty swans’
- Touch of archaism to many of his poems
- He has a strong sense of time, counts the
swans
‘I have looked upon those brilliant creatures’
- Present perfect tense, brings it into the
present
‘The bell –beat of their wings above my head, Trod
with a lighter tread’
- ‘Bell-beat’ = connotations of time, bell chime
and toll, sound conveys longing for action of
youthful energy
- ‘Trod with a lighter tread’ = recalls his
youth, Yeats used to identify with the swans
more when he was younger, the idea that
they are energetic weighs upon him now, he
is old but the swans are eternally young
‘Unwearied still’

Yeats

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Yeats compares the longevity of the swans
to his own life

‘Their hearts have not grown old;’
- Yeats envies the swans youth, thus an elegy
to lost youth
‘Delight men’s eyes when I awake ‘someday’
- Yeats accepts the inevitability that at some
point even these symbols of youthful energy
and the freedom that comes with it belong
to younger men than Yeats

OTHER POEMS

‘Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander
where they will’
Link to Leda and the Swan:
‘Before the indifferent beak could
let her drop?’ Birds represent
freedom, they are free to do as
they please, but swans are also
creatures of violence
Link to The Fisherman:‘Write a
poem as cold and passionate as
the dawn’ dawn in contrast to
twilight, dawn symbolises the
beginning and twilight represents
his life coming to a close



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