Collection: The Wild Swans at Coole

Overview
First published in 1917, The Wild Swans at Coole gathers Yeats’s mid-1910s lyrics into a poised, autumnal book in which private reckoning and national turbulence quietly overlap. The volume is centered by the title poem, set at Lady Gregory’s estate in Coole Park, and explores the unease of a poet who senses time accelerating while nature’s cycles proceed undisturbed. Across the collection, Yeats pairs graceful natural images with crisp, reflective statements on art, love, and the fate of Ireland, yielding a cooler, more chastened music than his early Celtic Twilight manner. The result reads as a turning point: an artist surveying the costs of desire and history, and crafting forms equal to that scrutiny.

Setting and Imagery
Coole Park becomes a touchstone landscape. In the title poem, the speaker counts “nine-and-fifty swans” on the still water and feels, against their undiminished energy, the pressure of his own years. Water, stone, and wing recur: mirrored surfaces that record change; hard, durable matter that resists it; sudden flights that suggest ardor and freedom. Elsewhere the west of Ireland supplies fishermen, old houses, and wild creatures, all rendered with lucid, unornamented detail. Those concrete images often tilt toward emblem: a lake holds memory, a bird’s flight becomes an ideal, a ruined place stands for a country’s battered dignity. The rural setting does not isolate the poems from contemporary reality; it gives Yeats a clean horizon against which the drama of age, desire, and conscience can be sharply seen.

Themes
The core theme is time’s double action: it erodes the self while it clarifies value. In poem after poem, longing persists even as youth recedes; the heart refuses the lesson the body learns. That refusal is neither mocked nor fully endorsed; Yeats tests it, asking what remains worth loving when illusions fall away. The book’s love lyrics often look back on a long courtship and its fragments, weighing beauty’s power against the ordinary disarray of life. Alongside these are meditations on artistic vocation. Yeats imagines an ideal audience, a single honest man whose taste and integrity justify the labor of making poems, and he contrasts such purity with the clamor of political faction and literary fashion. Without program or manifesto, the volume registers disillusion with public life after violent upheaval while insisting that art, stripped of extravagance, can still keep faith with truth. Memory, too, is central: its tenderness is inseparable from its unreliability, yet it offers the only bridge between past intensity and present calm.

Style and Form
The diction is pared and deliberate, the rhetoric steadied by balanced clauses and hard rhymes. Yeats favors regular stanza shapes and memorable closing lines that tilt an image into statement. The mystical vapor of his early work gives way to a taut, luminous plainness: metaphors are fewer but more exact, and repetition works like a bell stroke rather than a haze. That austerity does not diminish lyric beauty; it refines it, letting cadence and image carry feeling without ornament. The poems’ authority comes from proportion, nature’s patterns are set beside human conflict, and each is allowed its measure.

Context and Significance
Composed during the Great War and in the aftermath of the Easter Rising, the book absorbs crisis without spectacle. Its elegiac mood is personal before it is public, yet the pressure of history is everywhere. The 1917 volume helped establish Yeats’s mature voice, disenchanted but unbroken, formal yet searching. It leaves a set of indelible emblems: swans on a Galway lake, a craftsman of words seeking one just reader, and the quiet admission that change, however feared, is the condition of beauty’s return.