19 pages • 38 minutes read
The Wild Swans at Coole
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Literary Devices
Form and Meter
Composed in 1916, during the heyday of the young Modernist poets who campaigned against inherited poetic forms as anachronistic and championed radical experiments in prosody, “The Wild Swans at Coole” is strikingly out of step with that bold crusade. In its form and meter, the poem reflects the respect that the 50-something William Butler Yeats had for the disciplined structure of the iconic poets of the 19th century. By the standards of his own era, Yeats’s poem is unconventionally conventional.
The poem is executed in five six-line stanzas, known as sestets. Each line follows, with some degree of variation, iambic meter, using the traditional two-beat unit of unaccented followed by accented beat, duh-DUH, which matches conversational patterns. The first and third lines of each stanza have four such two-beat units; Lines 2, 4, and 6 have three such units; and the closing line of each stanza has five such units. The rhyme scheme in each stanza follows the tight ABCBDD patterning.
Given the poet/speaker’s melancholy musing, the poem would easily have sustained so-called free-verse or open-verse form. Yeats’s decision to execute the poem with strict attention to inherited poetics underscores the poem’s theme that within the chaos and confusion of time, art (the discipline of artisanship itself) offers the sole possibility of redemption through the assertion of order.
Setting
Coole Park itself is a character in Yeats’s poetic meditation. The poet/speaker does not burden the poem with specifics of his own emotional traumas, his lost loves, or his worries over the perilous state of Europe and his beloved Ireland, but he does locate his unfolding contemplation in a specific park. If he keeps his own tribulations vague, however, he is curiously specific about where he has these thoughts. His thoughts on the brevity of human life and each person’s vulnerability to the unsettling and unstoppable changes within time’s inevitable passing occur at Coole Park, the woods of more than 1,000 acres surrounding the Galway estate of Augusta Lady Gregory, an influential playwright and a wealthy benefactor of Irish artists, among them Yeats.
Like the great Romantic poets Yeats admired, however, the poet/speaker uses setting as symbol, much as William Wordsworth did with Tintern Abbey, John Keats with the Nile River, William Blake with London, and Percy Shelley with Mont Blanc. The park, with its great pond, its handsome trees, its grand canopy of sky, its herd of wild swans, and, supremely, its serenity, becomes a symbol for tonic refuge, a welcoming shelter, unchanging and reliable, for the sensitive, introspective poet unsettled by a world of confusion, moral chaos, and relentless change. The poem details the lush setting to recreate it as a fine and private world of beauty lost to the larger world outside its gates.
Allegory
“The Wild Swans at Coole” is an allegory about the power of art. An allegory is an artistic construct in which an artist, both painters and writers, creates a text-scape wherein all of its elements lend themselves to a comprehensive reading of a single driving idea. Allegories offer artists the opportunity to take events or settings or people from the real world and use them to share an idea. Every element is carefully chosen by the artist to promote a fixed idea. Most often associated with religious art, allegories offer a way to explore otherwise complex abstract ideas through the manipulation of objects familiar to readers who might lack the philosophical training.
To readers of Modern and Postmodern poetics, which investigate the real-time world more subtly and less aggressively didactic, allegories can seem manipulative and obvious. Because an allegory has a message, not so much a theme, allegories are rare in contemporary literature and art.
In keeping with Yeats’s respect for classical literature, “The Wild Swans at Coole” is an example of a modern allegory. Rather than teach difficult theological ideas, however, Yeats, who was fascinated by spiritualism and mysticism, uses the simple and direct narrative of reuniting with the swans at the park to argue his perspective on the power of art itself. Unlike contemporary poetry, traditional allegories do not invite discussion nor debate. Hence, there is little complexity to Yeats’s allegory: The world is chaotic; art is not. Everything changes in the world; art does not. Love wounds; art heals.
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By William Butler Yeats
