The Wild Swans at Coole

Like Robert Frost and Thomas Hardy, iconic poets to whom William Butler Yeats is often compared, Yeats’s long career straddled the transition from 19th-century to 20th-century poetics.

“The Wild Swans at Coole” reflects this transition. It was written at a time when the emerging generation of younger poets, self-styled Modernists, were exploring the implications of the new industrial age and the rapid growth of cities and their threat of dehumanization, spiritual enervation, and moral decay. Yet Yeats, himself in his fifties, here echoes the complex relationship with nature that defined the Romantic movement all but lost in the Modernist era.

In seeking the refuge of Coole Park, the poet/speaker establishes the need to engage “Nature” (for Romantics, always capitalized) as a way to encourage meditative reflection far from the distracting busyness of the city. In addition to the emotional response the poet/speaker feels to the quiet majesty of the dozens of swans that paddle about the still lake, the poem highlights the trees in their autumn foliage, the hanging blue of the October sky, and the crisp bracing air of the fall afternoon. Much like the Romantics who inspired a young Yeats, most notably William Wordsworth and Percy Shelley, Nature inspires the poet.