A Poem Without Therapy: A Reading Of The Wild Swans At Coole

The Wild Swans at Coole is a poem that balances reticence with disclosure. The substances may be the same but a logic based on proportions fails. Reticence is the opposite of disclosure. The poem’s theme is mortality, loss, disillusionment, realism, and transience. But it’s also about beautiful trees in a lake with swans. The poem is mysterious because of its intensity and resonance. One feels that an inner world has been revealed, like a bare confession. But only one statement in the entire poem directly expresses the poet’s feelings: “And my heart is sore.”

The tone of the poem, which is casually poetic and eloquently poised between high-art and low-art, is a mixture of both. Yeats created a stanza that begins with a ballad and alternates tetrameter lines with trimeter. The quatrains and couplets are enjambments between the stanzas, except for the first and third. The stanza is rhymed xaxaxabbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb. The fluid prosody of this poem gives it a relaxed feel. By far, most of the lines are metrical. Some lines must be elided for proper scanning; others have a lot of initial truncations. This creates a feeling of extempore rumination. The poem’s most impressive moments, “And scatter wheeling around in large broken rings”, or “The Bell-beat of Their Wings Above My Head”, are all just on the edge of speech. There’s nothing in this poem (like “Adam’s Curse’s” penultimate paragraph) that is unquestionably hieratic.

Time is the organizing principle in this poem. The poem is not chronological; the first 26 lines alternate between the present and the past, often in the same line. The poem is part of a nostalgic lyric genre in which time is a major antagonist. Returning to a landscape that he first saw nineteen years ago, the speaker sees his younger self reflected there, and feels a loss between who he used to be and who he is now. Yeats is not as blaming the natural environment for his loss. The first stanza is full of harmony. The trees are in season, and the woodland paths are not too wet. Prepositions in lines 3, 4, and 5 – “under,” ‘upon,” ‘among” – feel complete, as if all space had been taken into consideration and proved sound. “The autumn trees are beautiful” underlines the fact that the scene is normal and appropriate. The only discordant note is very muted and unnoticed. “Nine-and fifty swans”, however, becomes more apparent when paired with the line “lover-by-lover” in stanza 4

In line seven “upon”, the second of this series’ prepositions, is transformed completely. In line 5 it was a positive preposition, its directionality downward balanced by “brimming”. It is now a negative preposition. The speaker has become passive when it comes to time. The years “come to” him. They do not “pass”, “pass on”, or even “spend”. The next lines take us back to 19 years ago, when Yeats first visited Coole Park. The passiveness is immediately broken. It is not the verbs that convey the activity (such as “made my counts,” “saw,” or “had well completed”) but the reaction of the swans when they see the speaker. In his youth, Yeats was only thirty-two years old. Before he finished counting, he made them “scatter” in large broken rings. The words “scatter,” “broken,” or “clamorous,” all convey disorder. The swans are scared away. I suspect “great broken rings,” which also has a hermetic meaning, is not something that I can discuss. On his first visit, the speaker did not fit into the harmony and order described in the poem’s opening stanza. Instead, he upset it. He can now count the birds as he pleases. The swans look utterly unconcerned. They may have become used to him over time, or they might be part of that loss, which the poem laments. Both explanations, I believe, are compatible; in either case, the “passion and the conquest” that the speaker later envies the swans have been lost.

This is the only line that ends the poem mid-stanza. The stanza ends with a sentence that is a performance, a mirror of the temporal concatenation of the poem.

Since I heard at twilight all has changed.

First time on this coast

The wingbeats of the birds above me.

Lighter treads are better for tripping.

After a three line suspension, the syntax of line 15 continues. It is a break between subject and verb that is particularly dramatic. The interpolation is also broken between the verb (“hearing”), and the object. The subordinate clause says “hearing their bell-beat at twilight”. Both are qualified with “the very first time I’ve been on this shore.” The result of the braid is one that has a lot of glitz, but conveys very little. The sentence says “All’s been changed”; the verb is deferred in a way that promises a dramatic explanation. Deferral is expected to bring a revelation of some kind. The result is, however, a conventional statement, like “my heart hurts”, as if a difficult problem had been attempted and then abandoned. Deferrals do not convey the necessary information to justify their intrusion. They repeat the scene from stanza 2 but only add that they took place in the twilight. It is important to note that the swans sound has been changed. Previously they were just “clamorous” but now it’s a “bell beat”. The poem invests its greatest amount of aesthetic energy into this image, which conjures grandeur, order, and solemnity.

The poem is still stuck. The speaker failed to reveal the truth in a stanza. Stanza four returns to the current scene. The speaker attempts a revelation through displacement. He describes the swans as “Unwearied, lover by lover” and uses terms that only have meaning when viewed in contrast with the speaker. This word, “Companionable”, emphasizes the ease with which the swans adapt to their environment, as well as the harmony in the society. It is still a powerful adjective, but we know that the speaker is not speaking from his point of view. We suspect that he is trying to convey a sense of solitude. The unexplored, but to me, irrefutable, reminder that the number six swans is missing a mate (“Lover by Lover”) comes from this line. This loss may not be expressed explicitly because it would slant the poem towards sentimentality, but it is nonetheless encoded. The next line encourages a similar contrastive mode of interpretation, with another syntactical aberration. The semi-colon divides each of the poem’s four stanzas into two parts, with the exception of stanza 3, where the parts appear as separate sentences. This stanza has two semi-colons, and the sentence is divided into three parts. The effect is that line twenty-two must be highlighted, as it needs to receive the scansion necessary, a trochee to represent the first leg, to resonate in its full force: “Their Hearts Have Not Grown Old.”

The last part of the sentence, which is the third and final one, imagines that the lives of the Swans are full: “Passion or Conquest, wander where you will,/ Attend upon them Still.” While a couplet had previously praised their ease, tranquility, and social life, it now envies their power to disturb and even cause violence. The word “conquest” also implies violence or displacement, a disquiet that must be overcome through persistence or force. These lines are shocking, as they do not depict the peaceful, loving swans that one would expect to see in poetry. Instead, they suggest a violent, praiseworthy act of violence.

It is repeated in the entire poem, even though it was used as an end rhyme only a few lines earlier. The word appears here as well as in line 4 in its adjectival form: “still air”, “still waters”. The two instances in stanza 4 are adverbial. In line 24, it means something completely opposite to the adjective. It is the persistent potential for violence and disturbance. The swans’ most pacific adjective, “drift”, is used after they have imagined their conquests. As though to undermine their own vision, the poem insists that their mystery. Conjectures are all that the poet can offer about their future lives outside Coole Park. The speaker’s imaginings are immediately recalled in the poem as he considers the swans supposedly inevitable departure from Lake Coole.

What rushes are they going to build?

What lake or pool’s edge?

When I wake up, I will delight men’s eyes.

What if you find that they’ve flown off?

The poem’s shift in tenses was unexpected. It has added a third future term to the genre of now/then. The effect will be devastating. Losses in the present won’t be lessened or soothed but rather compounded. This poem has finally addressed a concrete and anticipated loss. However, its reticence in mentioning it makes us suspect that other people may also be affected by this loss. After line 27, there is a correction in the sentence. It is telling that the swans are still living, but they have no one to share it with. The “men” in the poem are not just generic, but also have an erotic quality. The poet is beaten by his rival, even if the poem is impersonal. Future tense doesn’t offer hope or possibilities, but rather deprivation. It turns the screw on the speaker and his unspeakable loss. The poem’s desperation is quiet. Its source and its means of conveying it – the logic of reticent revelation – are slowly and with great hesitation revealed. But the despair is total. This is not a therapy poem.