William Butler Yeats

Yeat’s “The Wild Swans at Coole” is a very nostalgic stroll down memory lane for a man who is coming to terms with his age. The poem opens up as a nice autumn evening stroll near a pond. The speaker tells us that it is a clear, dry night; the water is so calm that the mirror image of the sky reflects off of it. This description paints quite the picture for the reader’s mind. The speaker counts “nine-and-fifty” swans on the pond.

“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.”

After counting the swans, he thinks back nineteen years ago to when he first attempted to count them. He did not get a count back then, because they abruptly took off “upon their clamorous wings.” He is thinking to himself, “Wow, has it really been nineteen years?” and he begins to think about the swans.

“Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;”

He looks at these swans as if they too are aging with him, but when he looks closer, they haven’t changed. They are still the same swans that were here nineteen years ago when he first attempted to count them. He thinks to himself, “How can this be? I have grown so much older, but the swans, with their love for one another, stay forever young. The speaker then imagines what the future holds for him and his beloved swans. Will he see them the next year or will they leave to grace another lake and nest and produce more swans? He wonders if he will come back the following year “To find that they have flown away?” The poem leaves us on a question to ponder.

The poem reminds me a lot of a persons mid-life crisis. Here we have this guy, who can’t accept the fact that his relationship with these swans is nineteen years old and he stands in shock. He doesn’t know what lay ahead in his journey, and to many people that becomes a haunting thought.