The Wild Swans at Coole Literary Elements

The poem is narrated by a first-person speaker.

The poem has a regular stanza, written mostly in iambic meter, two lines in tetrameter and three lines in trimeter. Each stanza has the same rhyme scheme, ABCBDD. The poem has 30 lines and 5 stanzas.

Yeats uses the swans as a metaphor for the eternal beauty he sees in nature, love, and the imagination. While everything else around him seems to be dying and aging, the swans (and what they represent) remain the same, unchanged in time and always full of life.

In the third stanza, the alliterative phrase "bell-beat" captures the steady beat of the swans' wings as they fly above the poet. Also "trod" and "tread" both begin with "t"s, forming a musical phrase that evokes the whimsicality of the narrator's youth.

Yeats also uses assonance to enhance the poem's rhythmic, vivid nature. In the first stanza, the words "mirrors" and "brimming" mirror each other, both using the same "i" sounds, evoking an image of a mirrored lake within the words of the poem itself. In the second, the words "wheeling" and "rings" and "broken" and "clamorous" each contain vowels that mirror each other ("ing" and "o"), creating a sensation of circular, spinning motion.

In "The Wild Swans at Coole,’’ the difference between the swans and the poet is somewhat ironic. The swans are full of life and live without worrying, while the poet is old, at the twilight of his life, and this creates a sharp contrast that pervades the poem.
It is also ironic that the narrator finds himself in the same woods where he was nineteen years ago, observing the same swans, though so much has changed in his own life.

Allegory

The poem takes place at a lake in the woods in Coole Park, in County Galway, Ireland. The time is twilight in autumn.

The tone the poet uses is tragic and regretful, full of melancholy, but it is threaded with hints of reverence and respect for life's beautiful mysteries.

The protagonist is the speaker, and the antagonist, if any, would be the forces of time and their inevitable conquest of mortal men.

The major conflict in the poem is the speaker's battle with his younger self and his memories of more glorious times, which war against his knowledge that those times have passed by and he is now older and lonelier than he once was. He struggles to make peace with this, to relinquish his attachment to beauty and bygone eras, and to not let his longing for the past consume him.

The poem's climax occurs when the swans suddenly start to fly above the speaker, awakening emotional feelings and sending the speaker reeling into a deep meditation on time which ultimately leads him back down to a place of stillness and reverence, making the poem into a circular arc.

The poem begins and ends in the same place. The first stanza, with its discussions of dry paths and autumnal woods, does not mention the speaker at all: he is absent from the scene until the second stanza. This foreshadows the poem's last lines, which also describe a world without the speaker when they imply that the swans will someday leave him forever. The first stanza of the poem perhaps foreshadows the speaker's ultimate realization that someday some other observer will come to watch these swans on a different shore, long after he himself is gone.

The poem's last few lines are examples of understatements, as they express none of the narrator's fear of aging and losing contact with the electric beauty of youth that the rest of the poem implies."By what lake or pool / delight men's eyes when I awake someday / to find that they have flown away?" he asks, an understatement that does not portray the full strength of his sadness at the thought of the day when he awakes without the swans. (However, this statement may also imply his acquisition of a sense of peace that eluded him in the rest of the poem).

From the beginning, the poet makes numerous allusions to death. Symbols such as dry paths and trees, twilight and the time setting point towards the idea of life coming to an end.
The poet may be alluding to Maud Gonne, his lost love, as he endows the swans with human-like characteristics.

The whole poem is an example of a synecdoche, in which a part is used to represent a whole. The narrator's memory of observing the swans nineteen years ago serves to represent the entirety of his youth, and his observations in the present moment in the autumn wood serve as expressions of the whole latter part of his life.

The woods, also, serve to represent the vastness of the narrator's loneliness and loss, and his descriptions of the swans imply that they represent far more than just birds: they represent vast expanses of dreams, freedom, love, and creativity.

The poet personifies the swans, giving them a complexity of emotion and an internal landscape that seems quite human-like. To have hearts attended upon by passion and conquest seems to be a rather human attribute, and it often seems like the swans are really people that the narrator has lost but remembers reverently.

The narrator describes the swans' ascent to flight in dramatic terms, and his phrasing exaggerates the drama and grandeur of their takeoff. The phrase "scatter wheeling in great broken rings" makes the swans' rise seem explosive and gigantic, and also deeply symbolic, as interlocking rings are common and complex occult themes.

The phrases "bell-beat" and "clamorous" are onomatopoeias because they suggest the fluttering, clapping sounds that swans’ wings make when they fly.