W B Yeats: The Wild Swans at Coole: Analysis and Review of AQA anthology poem.

Overview.

Life is full of inconstancy and change. Our minds crave signs of enduring love because we know that time escapes our futile attempts at  self-government, and our own mortality must be faced sooner or later.

So what can our hearts seize upon in order to anchor our minds to order, stability and immutability? What can our hearts remember in times of sadness and regret?

What ‘fragments’ can we ‘shore against our ruins’ ( T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland) when emotions threaten to sweep us under life’s current?

What remains immutable?

For Yeats, like so many poets, nature redeems that which betrays our hearts. Its transcendence and indifference to our petty passages on this earth may alter the perspective we hold on ourselves and our hearts’ concerns.

‘When I awake some day/ to find they have flown away.‘

Do we awaken unto death or unto an epiphany about the mutability of our concerns?

Does this phrase suggest we spend much of our existence asleep or dreaming of being fully awake to our lives?

I love the sound of this poem and the sound seems even more affecting than the meaning.

The meaning is viscerally experienced perhaps and that is why its message is both private and public at the same time.

The meeting of the inner world of the poet with the external world of nature forms the interest of the poem.

Notice how local, specific details become universalised into a meditation upon our human, spiritual existence.

The former serves to raise our consciousness towards the latter. And the striving and pain:’my heart is sore’ becomes reconciled somehow, even if ‘only’ through the cathartic act of writing.

The poem’s creation remains something intact beyond betrayal and mortality.

Reading the poem you can hear the ‘communion’ between the poet’s inner and outer feelings, between appreciative reverie and painful observation leading to  acceptance.

Perhaps the poem leaves us with a sense of transcendence despite inevitable betrayal, decay, death.

For what remains and will endure is the poem itself, still one of the most yearning and beautiful poems of the twentieth century.

If Larkin is right( even when he is trying to be wrong!)  in Arundel Tomb, then what will survive of us  is love-  forever symbolised by Yeats’  Wild Swans at Coole.

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  An extra thought!

  Why, I wonder, is the word ‘still’ repeated four times in the poem?

  It seems echoic and even could be said to ‘haunt’ the poem. Perhaps it acts like a  pebble sending ripples across the waters at Coole and even across the poet’s consciousness and finally across ‘time’ itself.

  Perhaps its meaning oscillates between ‘still’  signifying peace and tranquillity with ‘still’ signifying something enduring or remaining on going.

  There is a sense of tranquillity about the word still and this is set against the melancholy of change.

  First Stanza analysis.

  The season of ‘autumn’ heralds a gradual process of decay or transformation as nature embraces either death or a slowing down and retreat.

  Perhaps this supposedly objective, impersonal opening with its interest in reflections and mirrors suggests an identification of the poet with his surroundings. He is in his autumn years, aware of the passage of time and the unfulfilled hopes he has had around finding  a fulfilling relationship.

  Hence he notices the odd number of swans. He expresses this number in an archaic manner: ‘nine and fifty swans’.

  Perhaps this archaism reminds us of time and history  and the repetition of loss.  The fact that the number ‘nine’ is expressed first emphasises the fact that the number is odd,  as is the poet in his isolation.

  One swan is without a mate. He notices this ( and we do wonder about his ability to count SO many swans) because he projects his own inner feelings onto nature.

  One world reflects another and harmony reigns between the earth and the sky. Yet the ‘brimming’ quality suggests this ‘still’ atmosphere is temporary.

   

  Change is coming and the word ‘brimming’ also gives an energy to the scene and the swans are very much a part of both the stillness and well as the movement.

   

  They capture his attention and give powerful representation to his heart’s state which is seems tied up with the ‘broken rings‘ and the deeply moving declaration that could also be acceptance later:

  ‘And now my heart is sore.’

  NOW my heart is sore. Courage and compassion for the self and the beloved.

  The intensity of the moment ‘now’ gives no refuge in any other time.

  The poet is profoundly present to his heartache.

  More to come.