The Wild Swans at Coole
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Reviews for The Wild Swans at Coole
18 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Thanks to my daughter, I was fortunate to encounter the poems of W.B. Yeats upon my recent visit to Dublin. Having visited the Yeats exhibition at the National Library of Ireland, I was intrigued by this complex man who wrote so deftly about issues, such as aging and death, as well as love, and the beauty of nature. I especially loved the poem to which this collection was named, ‘The Wild Swans of Coole,’ a place of extraordinary beauty in which Yeats contemplates how the lovely swans, unlike himself who is weary, still experience life passionately and freely. In witnessing the swans paddling in the cold, or the lovely moment of the ‘bell-beat of their wings’ above his head, Yeats also realizes how fleeting this moment of beauty can be, as he considers how when he awakens some day, the swans may have flown away. It seems to me that Yeats often wrote about his relationships with women, and since he was promiscuous throughout his life, he was awarded with ample writing resources. Throughout his life, Yeats possessed an unrequited love for a well-spirited woman named Maude Gonne with whom he maintained a close friendship throughout his life. In this anthology, Yeats writes a very short poem, entitled ‘Memory,’ in which he compares the love of his life to a mountain hare, for where the hare lies, its form cannot be held in the mountain grass. To me, Yeats speaks of the elusiveness of this idyllic relationship. Written with only a few lines, this poem to me is almost perfection, as a haiku, which succinctly speaks profoundly with minimal words.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5While I liked a few of the poems in this selection, most were just humdrum for me. I didn't hate them or find them impossible to understand (which is far too often the case with poetry for me) but they didn't speak to me. These are the poems I liked best in the collection: "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death", "The Living Beauty", "The Hawk", "The Cat and the Moon" and "Another Song of a Fool"
Book preview
The Wild Swans at Coole - W. B. (William Butler) Yeats
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Title: The Wild Swans at Coole
Author: William Butler (W.B.) Yeats
Release Date: May 23, 2010 [EBook #32491]
Language: English
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THE WILD SWANS AT COOLE
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO · DALLAS
ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO
MACMILLAN & CO., Limited
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.
TORONTO
THE WILD SWANS
AT COOLE
BY
W. B. YEATS
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1919
All rights reserved
Copyright, 1917 and 1918,
By MARGARET C. ANDERSON.
Copyright, 1918,
By HARRIET MONROE.
Copyright, 1918 and 1919,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published March, 1919.
J. S. Cushing Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
PREFACE
This book is, in part, a reprint of The Wild Swans at Coole, printed a year ago on my sister's hand-press at Dundrum, Co. Dublin. I have not, however, reprinted a play which may be a part of a book of new plays suggested by the dance plays of Japan, and I have added a number of new poems. Michael Robartes and John Aherne, whose names occur in one or other of these, are characters in some stories I wrote years ago, who have once again become a part of the phantasmagoria through which I can alone express my convictions about the world. I have the fancy that I read the name John Aherne among those of men prosecuted for making a disturbance at the first production of The Play Boy,
which may account for his animosity to myself.
W. B. Y.
Ballylee, Co. Galway,
September 1918.
CONTENTS
THE WILD SWANS AT COOLE
The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine and fifty swans.
The nineteenth Autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.
I have looked