The Wild Swans at Coole

The poet/speaker, his life so dramatically altered across the close to two decades since his last visit to the lake at Coole Park, marvels at the permanence of the park’s landscape: the shimmering lake, the “still” sky (Line 4), the trees.

It is obviously a tender, romantic illusion. After all, the poet/speaker moves about the park at the approach of twilight on a mid-autumn afternoon, both reminders that this supposedly fixed nature is in constant flux, forever moving day to night, autumn to winter. This is reflected in the poet/speaker’s meditation on these 59 swans that so mesmerize him—19 years later, these same swans paddle about the lake, despite common sense saying that, given the swans’ limited life span in the wild (on average 12 years) these are not, cannot be, the same swans.

Nature’s permanence then is an idea to which the poet/speaker clings given the melancholy evidence all about him, outside the refuge of this park, of the world’s impermanence, its inclination to chaos and confusion. He relishes the idea of nature’s permanence: “All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight / The first time on this shore / The bell-beat of their wings above my head” (Lines 15-17). The closing stanza reflects this need when the poet/speaker asks rhetorically what would happen if the park, the lake, the swans themselves surrendered to flux and went away.