19 pages • 38 minutes read
William Butler YeatsThe Wild Swans at Coole
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1917A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
“Sailing to Byzantium” by William Butler Yeats (1926)
Yeats’s landmark poem, published nearly a decade after “The Wild Swans at Coole” echoes the anxieties of that poem and develops the idea of the power of art. The poem provides Yeats’s summary insight into the unsettling reality of time, the constant pressure of death, and the consolation offered to the artist by the artifacts they create.
“An Old Man’s Winter Night” by Robert Frost (1916)
A poet often compared to Yeats, Frost here offers his own melancholy meditation on aging. Like Yeats, Frost uses nature, specifically a night blizzard, to suggest an energy that defies humanity’s inevitable surrender to time. Nature, after all, recovers from its winters.
“Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats (1819)
A poet Yeats much admired and a poem he much discussed, this ode is a contemplation of the power of art to freeze moments and preserve them in a unique kind of forever. Sculpted in careful prosody that Yeats appreciated, the poem reassures humanity struggling in time that art is forever.
Literary Resources
“Yeats’s Discoveries of Self in ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’” by James H. O’Brien (1968)
The article examines the plight of aging and Yeats’s fears that, as he grew older, his own imaginative powers might wane. The poem represents Yeats’s withdrawal from the world, temporarily, as he regathers his confidence in the rhetorical question offered in the closing stanza.
Yeats: The Man and the Masks by Richard Ellman (Chapter 5; 1948, updated 2000)
From what is still considered a landmark study of Yeats, this chapter of Ellman’s book explores Yeats’s fascination with the conflict between spirit and matter. At heart a spiritualist, even a mystic, Yeats was drawn to the Platonic ideal of harmony suggested by the ability of art to bring together the material and spiritual worlds.
“‘The Wild Swans at Coole’ and Ireland of Its Time” by Masami Nakao (2013)
This is a historical reading of the poem. More than a lament for his assorted catastrophic relationships, the poem reflects Yeats’s realization of the bloody agonies of war and the suffering it brings, both World War I and the short-lived Irish Easter Uprising. The comfort Yeats offers comes from art’s ability to respond to such suffering and elevate it to the heroic.
Listen to the Poem
There are many recordings of “The Wild Swans at Coole.” The most impactful reading is undoubtedly a recording from the 1930s by Yeats himself, made in the time following his Nobel Prize win. The recitation, in Yeats’s gentle Irish brogue, lingers lovingly over the long vowels and rises and falls as the speaker watches the swans’ graceful movements with a complicated mix of regret and hope.
Related Titles
By William Butler Yeats
