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    The Wild Swans at Coole
    The Wild Swans at Coole
    The Wild Swans at Coole
    Ebook128 pages44 minutes

    The Wild Swans at Coole

    By W. B. (William Butler) Yeats

    3.5/5

    ()

    Read preview
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateJan 1, 1919
    The Wild Swans at Coole

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    Reviews for The Wild Swans at Coole

    3.5/5

    18 ratings2 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Thanks 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.
    • 3/5
      While 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

    Project Gutenberg's The Wild Swans at Coole, by William Butler (W.B.) Yeats

    This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

    almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or

    re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

    with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

    Title: The Wild Swans at Coole

    Author: William Butler (W.B.) Yeats

    Release Date: May 23, 2010 [EBook #32491]

    Language: English

    *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WILD SWANS AT COOLE ***

    Produced by Meredith Bach and the Online Distributed

    Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was

    produced from images generously made available by The

    Internet Archive/American Libraries.)

    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

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