Summary
The speaker finds himself wandering through a forest, which Yeats describes using vivid imagery that conjures up a nostalgic, melancholic mood. It is autumn, sometime during October, at twilight. The woods are peaceful and beautiful, though the earth is dry, no longer lush and green. The speaker comes upon a lake, which has a calm surface that reflects the clear sky. He counts fifty-nine swans swimming on the surface of the water.
In the second stanza, the speaker remembers that this is his nineteenth year visiting this place and counting the swans. At one point in the past, he remembers watching the swans suddenly fly away into the sky and scattering before he could finish counting, breaking the serene balance of the autumn woods, but in the present moment, they sit peacefully on the water.
In the third stanza, he reflects on the swans' beauty and majesty and feels an ache in his heart, realizing that everything has changed since he first came here nineteen years ago. Even the beating of their wings seemed lighter back then.
In the fourth stanza, the speaker thinks more deeply about the swans and what they mean to him. He observes that the swans do not seem tired or world-weary. They paddle through the cold streams and fly through the air in pairs. Their hearts seem as young and wild and carefree as they were nineteen years ago. At this point it seems that he starts to project some very human-like characteristics on the swans, stating that wherever the swans go they are still influenced by grand (human-like) things like passion or the desire for conquest and glory, traditionally youthful characteristics that belie an inner vibrance.
In the last stanza, the speaker observes the swans resting calmly on the water, and he takes in their majesty. He wonders where they will go after he is gone, knowing that they will continue to fly regardless of what happens to him, and that they will someday build nests by a different lake, bringing joy to different men. The poem ends on this complex melancholic note. The speaker knows that he will lose these swans, but he also knows that their beauty is everlasting.
Analysis
"The Wild Swans a Coole" begins with a descriptive passage that provides a window into the speaker's frame of mind. Autumn and twilight are both transitional periods, occupying liminal, transitional spaces in between extremes—autumn hangs between summer and winter, and twilight is between day and night. This setting informs the poem's nostalgic, reflective mood that expresses the fact that the speaker feels himself to be at a transitional period, no longer young but not quite at the very end of his life, though he can sense the end coming.
He gets a feeling of equilibrium and peace from the natural world, seeing the sky reflected on the water, which reflects the kind of sacred design he comes to find in nature by the end of the poem. The woods may also symbolize Yeats’ complex, self-reflective inner world, which in some ways stays the same but in other ways has completely changed over the years as he has grown spiritually and intellectually.
From a biographical point of view, this poem reflects Yeats’ own life and thought process, especially his love for Maude Gonne. The swan is a traditionally feminine symbol, and so we can infer that the swans symbolize his love for her, and the poem may be a lamentation about unrequited love. The ‘nine-and-fifty swans’ implies a sense of absence, as fifty-nine is an odd number that implies that one swan will be alone, with no companion of its own. It could be argued that this proverbial swan is Yeats himself, who was turned down by Maud and is now desolate. The rhyme scheme of ABCBDD means that, in a similar way, neither the first nor the third line have a correspondent, and thus they contrast with the rhyming couplet that stands as the perfect example of a harmonious pair. Here again, we have the juxtaposition between peaceful stillness and chaotic change. The poem as a whole is an attempt to reconcile these opposing forces.
At the present moment, the speaker observes, the swans are very peaceful—but he knows that their peacefulness is not permanent, and this makes it a little sad, for the observer knows that they will someday fly away as they did before. He envies the swans' freedom and the companionship they have with each other, which contrasts with his own stagnancy and his loneliness.
The swans seem also to symbolize the vitality of the speaker's youth, thus suggesting that they are products of his imagination or extensions of parts of himself that he feels he has lost. He wishes that he could count and control them, and mourns the fact that they will someday move on to someone else on a different shore. If the swans are read as allegories for Yeats’ love interest, feminist critics point out that this displays some sexism as the male speaker wants the swans, representations of women, to remain still. To him, women should be ‘tamed’ by men and thus cease to be ‘wild swans.’
Another way of reading this poem would be to read it as a metaphor for art and the artistic craft itself. Many of Yeats’ poems in the larger collection of works he wrote while in Galway, Ireland were introspective meditations on the act of artistic creation. Yeats mourns decay and the passage of time, missing long-ago eras when things were better, but he also views the swans as symbols of something eternal and everlasting—almost like creative, regenerative forces that counteract the passage of time. Yeats’ poetry, like the swans, continues to live on and on, bringing beauty to many people in different places despite the fact that the era it was written in, and its writer, have long passed away.
Yeats’ poetry is often understood as a bridge between the Romantic and the modernist eras, a transition from romantic poetry that idolized nature, beauty, and the eternal and sublime, to poetry more focused on life’s ephemerality and its lack of meaning and clarity. “The Wild Swans at Coole” reflects this, as it is both a love letter to peaceful serenity and nature and an acknowledgment that nothing wild can be kept still or controlled forever, and that death and change are parts of life.
The speaker comes to accept that although his own life may not last forever, things that are beautiful like the swans, love, and the soul—which may depart from the isolated, mortal self—can last forever in other ways (in art, nature, and larger spiritual forces). Life is mysterious and beautiful, he seems to be saying, and built on contradictions. It is short and ephemeral, but connected to something much greater and fundamentally eternal.
