What is The Wild Swans at Coole by W.B. Yeats about?

Question

Is there any meanings behind?

Answer 1

Actually, except for the last four lines (maybe), the poem is a fairly simple, direct poem. It will mean more to you if you work it out in your own mind and relate it to your own experience. So I've collected a few brief statements from some easily available links to help you with the background. Then I share with you a few questions that come my my mind as I read the poem. And last I'll share my feelings (and uncertainty) about those last four lines, to let you share with your own reading.

The Wild Swans at Coole is a collection of poems by William Butler Yeats, first published in 1917. It is also the name of a poem in that collection. I'm assuming, of course, you mean that one particular poem.

"The poem is written in 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." [Site #1 below.]

"Coole Park is an historical area of immense literary and cultural importance. The land belonged to Lady Gregory who was an important figure during the Irish Literary Revival. Lady Gregory and William Butler Yeats founded the Abbey Theater in Dublin. Yeats and Gregory were friends and colleagues for over 35 years. This is a gorgeous park which includes Coole Lough and some enchanting wooded areas." [Site #2 below.]

"Yeats wrote the poem about an area of Coole Lough He mentions 59 swans, which is significant because swans mate for life and there should be an even number of swans. Yeats had a tough time with women, and didn't marry until later in life. I think this odd swan in his poem may be a reference to himself. All swans have their mates, except this one...sort of like him. This same group of swans returned to the lake each year, just as Yeats kept coming back to Coole for over 30 years." [Site #2]

"Essentially, it is a simple reminscence of the first time a younger, less world-weary Yeats went to stay at Lady Gregory's Coole Park estate, a haven in the country for poets and writers and artists. There, he had seen what must have been a fantastic sight - assuming it is not an exaggeration - fifty-nine swans. I've never seen more than two adult pairs and their young at any one time, and that is glorious enough. To see so many, first calm on the water, then taking off into the air, magnificent, powerful wings making a sound that only a poet could put into words - 'a bell-beat' - would create an impression in any mind, let alone one as creative as Yeats.

"But being a master of poets, it would not do for Yeats to simply write about how great the swans were. He has to complicate it by sighing reminiscences on the past, and all that has happened since the first time he looked at the Coole swans, and to reflect that he has been changed by time - inevitably so - while the swans have remained as a constant. Then he reflects on the possibility that he might find them gone some day. In that, if we are still talking about swans, Yeats is displaying a lack of understanding of the nature of swans. They are not only monogamous, as he suggests in the phrase 'lover by lover' but very territorial. Even if they DO fly away, they will always come back as long as the lake at Coole is there for them to come back to he would always find them there. [Site #3]

Now with that background in mine, read the poem again;

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.

As you read the first stanza, think about beauties of a season, esp. autumn, that you notice and enjoy from year to year.

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.

As you read the second stanza, think of a particular scene/sight you have seen year and year (if not for nineteen years, at least for more than one). Are there some sounds and movements in the scene that might have surprised you the first time you experienced them?

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.

Now in the third stanza, the speaker talks about the changes that have come about in the 19 years he's been seeing the wild swans at Coole. What kinds of changes can you imagine he thinks off when he sees the swans again? Why might his heart be "sore"? Why do you think he says they "trod with a lighter tread" in earlier years? What might make the sound of their wings in the air seems heavier, more "clamorous" now?

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.

Yet, in the fourth stanza, the swans - "lover by lover" - haven't changed, or have they? Why do you think he would feel that "Their hearts have not grown old." This might suggest that, in contrast, his heart has grown older, "sore." Why and how might that be? We don't have to know details about his life history to be able to imagine the kinds of experiences that might have caused his heart to "age."

But now they drift on the still water,
Mysterious, beautiful;

In the fith stanza, we can imagine easily why he might think the swans drifting on the water would still seem beautiful to him. Just remember birds you see floating on the pond of a nearby park or the geese that stop by your part of the country as they migrate for the winter? But why would he call them mysterious?

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?

So now what about those last four lines, esp. the last two? He's already established that the swans don't change, they are always there? So why would he suddenly ask where the birds would be when he "awake[s] some day / To find they have flown away"? Could it possibly be that he will, in fact, awaken elsewhere, not here but in another, very different world?

As one ages (take it from one who knows!), one begins to realize that beauties we have always enjoyed -- the hills of Tennessee, the mountains of upstate New York, the birds in Central Park, the lakes of Wisconsin, the monarch butterflies migrating once again, the stretches of the plain in the Midwest, the mesas and canyons of the Southwest, the Redwoods, Puget Sound . . . . -- we may not see many times again. Our eyes dim, we are able to travel less widely, move around less nimbly, our bodies are not as painless, our memories may fade, and inevitably a day will come . . . .

Exactly what Yeats meant, of course, I do not know. I can only suggest to you what his words mean to me? Every year the beauty of the leaves of autumn seem more beautiful, and I experience them more intensely. I watch with greater care the migrating vees of the Canadian geese, because I am aware that I will not experience these beauties so many times again. And with that intensity of appreciation there is a vague sense of longing, of regret. And it isn't easy to explain why.

The swans will still "Delight men's eyes," but "where will they build" in relation to where I am, to where I will then "awaken"?