The Wild Swans at Coole

“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.