"The Wild Swans at Coole" is a poem of equal parts reticence and openness. Although the substances are the same, the logic of proportions fails; reticence is disclosure. The poem speaks of mortality, transience, disillusionment and loss; more literally, it's about beautiful trees and a swan lake. The mystery of the poem lies in the intensity and resonance of its emotional charge: one ends up with the sensation that an interior has been excavated, laid bare, as in the most naked confession, but of the propositional content of the poem only an affirmation, of the all conventional, it directly addresses the poet's sentiment: "And now my heart is aching." This is not a bad line, and it is a significant event in the poem; but the source of emotional impact lies elsewhere - in suggestion, in elided narrative and above all in displacement: the speaker reveals himself through the implicit contrast with the landscape that surrounds him, and in particular with the swans that are the subject and occasion of the poem. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay The modes of poetry are casually eloquent, poised between high and low art. The stanza invented by Yeats begins as a ballad, with alternating lines of tetrameter and trimeter. He adds a final couplet, whose epigrammatic force is attenuated by the different lengths of the lines (pentameter and trimeter), and also by the enjambement between quatrain and couplet in all the stanzas except the first and third. The verse rhymes xaxabb; twice ("stones"/"swans"; "beautiful"/"pool") the rhymes are slanted. The poem's casual atmosphere is accentuated by remarkably fluid prosody: by far the majority of the lines contain metrical variations. Initial truncations, anapests and feminine endings abound; some lines require elisions for correct scanning; at least one line (l. 21, with its extra foot) seems hopelessly irregular. All this helps to create an air of extemporaneous reflection, and also the poem's grandest moments: "And scatter spinning in great broken rings"; “The beating of their wings above my head” – it hovers from this very part of the speech. There is nothing in the poem (like the figurative density of the penultimate paragraph of “Adam's Curse”) that indisputably borders on the hieratic mode. The organizing structural principle of the poem is time. However, the poem does not move in chronological order; instead, the first twenty-six lines oscillate between present and past in an uneasy concatenation, sometimes shifting in the course of a single line. The poem participates in that kind of nostalgic lyric for which time is the great antagonist: returning to a place visited for the first time nineteen years earlier, the speaker finds his younger self reflected in the landscape and perceives a difference between what who was and what is. that can only be called loss. Unlike Wordsworth in the Ode to Immortality, Yeats does not project this loss outward into the natural world. The first verse, in fact, presents a harmonious natural scene: the trees are as they should be, beautiful in their season; things are neither too wet (“The woodland paths are dry”) nor in drought conditions (“the water is full”); the sky, like water, is serene, "still"; and there is even a touch of hermetic order in the "mirror[ing]" of high and low ("as above, so below") on the lake's surface. The prepositions of lines three, four and five - "below", "above", "between" - seem exhaustive, as if all possible space has been considered and proven valid. Nor are things in any way extraordinary: the simple property of “Trees arein their autumnal beauty" attests to the normality, the rightness, of the scene. The only note of disagreement is muted, and perhaps still imperceptible: "fifty nine swans" gets its proper resonance only with "lover for lover" of stanza four. The second preposition of the series, "up", returns entirely in line seven transformed. In the fifth line it was a floating preposition, its downward direction balanced by the rise of "heap"; speaker is passive in the face of time. The years "approach" him: he does not "live" them, he does not "pass" them, or he does not "spend" them. The following lines turn to the past, when nineteen years earlier Yeats made the his first visit to Coole Park. This does not happen, however, in the verbs ("I counted", "I saw" and "I had well finished"), which hardly signify great activity; response of swans to the presence of the speaker. In his youth (his relative youth: Yeats was thirty-two), the speaker disturbed the natural scene he encountered. Before he could finish counting their number, he had them "disperse in great broken rings." “Dispersed,” “broken,” and “sensational” all convey disorder: the swans have been frightened. (I suspect that the "great broken rings" also carry a certain hermetic charge, the meaning of which I am not qualified to discuss.) On his first visit to the lake, the speaker was not part of the harmony and order figured in the first sentence of the poem. room; on the contrary, it disturbed him, it was a note of dissonance. After two decades he can count birds to his heart's content. The swans, we discover, are sublimely indifferent: either the birds have become accustomed to the presence of the speaker in later years, or part of the loss lamented by the poem is represented by this inability to disturb a natural order, by some decayed vigor and from the threat that accompanies it. . The two explanations are not, I believe, incompatible; in any case, lost for the speaker is the "passion and conquest" that he will later envy the swans. For the first two stanzas the description of the swans is neutral, but admiration emerges in the thirteenth line, accompanied by the poem's central act of revelation: "I looked upon those brilliant creatures, / And now my heart is aching." The revelation interrupts the poem: this is the only sentence that ends mid-stanza. The stanza resumes with an extraordinary execution of a sentence, mirroring, in its extraordinarily complicated syntax, the temporal concatenation that structures the poem: Everything has changed since I, listening at dusk, The first time on this shore, The bell ringing of the their wings above my head, Tread with lighter step. The syntax of the fifteenth line, which presents a particularly dramatic break as it falls between subject and verb, continues only after a three-line suspension. Furthermore, the interpolation itself is broken between verb ("feel") and object. The main proposition is "Everything has changed since I walked with a lighter step"; the subordinate clause is "to hear the beating of their wings in the twilight"; "first time on this shore" qualifies both. The result is a braid whose glare obscures the small amount of information actually transmitted. “Everything has changed,” the sentence declares, and the elaborate postponement of the verb promises a dramatic elaboration of the statement. A psychological revelation commensurate with the effort of deferral is expected. What emerges, however, is - like the more direct "my heart is aching" - entirely conventional, as if a great difficulty had been faced, attempted and then abandoned. Nor does the information provided by the deferral seem to justify the force of its intrusion; repeats the scenealready described in the second verse, adding only that it too took place at dusk. The important thing, however, is that the swans have transformed: while before they were simply "sensational", now the sound of their wings is a "beat of a bell". This image receives the poem's greatest aesthetic investment, evoking grandeur, solemnity, and order. However, the poem hit a snag. One verse treaded water; the speaker attempted a revelation strategy and failed. Stanza four brings the poem back to the present scene and attempts revelation through displacement, describing the swans in comprehensive terms significant only as the speaker's contrasting comment: "Still tireless, lover after lover, / They row in the cold / Companion streams or climb the air". Important here is not only the agelessness or resilient ("tireless") vitality of the swans, but also their freedom and their suitability for contrasting elements. "Companion" is the most striking word in these lines, and underlines both the ease of the swans in their environment and, especially with "lover for lover", the harmony and fullness of their society: every swan has its companion. The adjective is poignant, however, because we suspect that it characterizes a state different from that of the speaker; it is a silent revelation of his own loneliness. (“Lover to lover” elicits an untapped but, I think, undeniable memory of the number of swans indicated in line six: one of these creatures is missing its mate. Perhaps making this loss explicit would tilt the poem unhappily toward sentiment, but the loss is still encoded.) This contrastive reading mode is also imposed by the next line, which is highlighted by another syntactic anomaly. Each of the poem's stanzas is divided into two syntactic parts by a semicolon, except in the third stanza, where the parts are framed as distinct sentences. In this verse, however, there are two semicolons; the syntax of the sentence is divided into three parts. The effect is to highlight line twenty-two, a line that must receive its proper and necessary scansion, a trochee for the first foot, in order to resonate with its own strength: "Their hearts have not grown old." One segment of the phrase imagines the fullness of the swans' lives: "Passion or conquest, wander where they will, / Care for them again." A curious turning point was made by the recognition of verse twenty-two: while the first three verses of the verse celebrated the ease of life of the swans, their placidity and society, the couplet instead envies their capacity for disturbance and even violence: "passion" it is not a word of the same order as "companion," or even "lover to lover"; denotes extremism and loss of self-government and comfort. Likewise, “conquest” requires violence, or at least displacement: an initial disquiet about a new environment that is overcome by persistence or force. These lines should, I think, be shocking: these are not the placid, loving swans one expects to find in poems; instead there is a hint of laudable violence, of the "brute blood of the air" that Yeats will evoke so forcefully in "Leda and the Swan". This violence is inevitable; the true freedom of the swans comes from the inevitability of the "passion and conquest" so necessary to their young hearts: they will find them "wandering where they will." lives as imagined by the poet, who must detach himself from his own imaginings: “But now they drift on the still water, / Mysterious, beautiful.” The repetition of "still" so quickly after its use as an end rhyme in line twenty-four highlights its presence throughout the poem. It appears both here and in verse four in its adjectival sense: “still sky,” “still water.” Its two occurrences in stanza four, however, are adverbial, and especially in the.