“The Wild Swans at Coole” is a poem of equal parts reticence and disclosure. Although the substances are the same, a logic of proportion fails; reticence is disclosure. The poem is about 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: we end it with the feeling that an interior has been searched, laid bare, as in the most brutal confession, but of the propositional content of the poem , a single, completely conventional statement directly addresses the poet's feelings: “And now my heart hurts. » This is not a verse without beauty, and it is a significant event in the poem; but the source of the emotional impact lies elsewhere - in the suggestion, the elided narrative and above all the displacement: the speaker reveals himself through an implicit contrast with the landscape which surrounds him, and in particular with the swans which are the subject and occasion of the poem. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essayThe manner of the poem is nonchalantly eloquent, balancing high and low art. The stanza invented by Yeats begins like a ballad, with alternating tetrameter and trimeter lines. He adds a final couplet, any epigrammatic force of which is attenuated by the different lengths of the verses (pentameter and trimeter), as well as by the enjambment between the quatrain and the couplet in all the stanzas except the first and third. The stanza rhymes xaxabb; twice ("stones"/"swans"; "beautiful"/"swimming pool") the rhymes are slanted. The casual aspect of the poem is reinforced by an extraordinarily fluid prosody: by far the majority of lines contain metrical variations. Initial truncations, anapestes and feminine endings abound; some lines require elisions for correct scansion; at least one line (l. 21, with its extra foot) seems irremediably irregular. All of this contributes to an air of improvised rumination, and even to the poem's most grandiose moments - "And scattered in great broken rings"; “The beating of their wings above my head” – hover just this side of the speech. There is nothing in the poem (like the figurative density of the penultimate paragraph of “The Curse of Adam”) that unquestionably shifts into hieratic mode. The organizing structural principle of the poem is time. However, the poem does not move chronologically; instead, the first twenty-six lines oscillate between present and past in choppy concatenation, sometimes moving within the course of a single line. The poem participates in this type of nostalgic lyricism 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 in the landscape and feels between this what he was and what he is a difference. it can only be called a loss. Unlike Wordsworth in the Ode on Immortality, Yeats does not cast this loss outward, onto the natural world. Indeed, the first stanza presents a harmonious natural scene: the trees are as they should be, beautiful in their season; things are neither too wet (“The forest paths are dry”) nor in drought (“the water is overflowing”); the sky, like water, is serene, “still”; and there is even a touch of hermetic order in the “mirror” of above and below (“as above, so below”) on the surface of the lake. The prepositions in lines three, four and five – “under”, “on”, “among” – seem exhaustive, as if all possible space had been taken into account andproved the sound. There's nothing extraordinary about things either: the easy propriety of "The trees are in their autumnal beauty" attests to the normality, the accuracy of the scene. The only note of discord is muted, and perhaps still imperceptible: “fifty-nine swans” only finds its proper resonance with the “lover by lover” of the fourth stanza. The second preposition of the series, “sur”, returns in the seventh line completely transformed. In the fifth line it was a preposition of buoyancy, its downward direction being balanced by the rise of the "overflow"; here, it is a preposition of oppressive weight. The speaker is passive in the face of time. The years “happen” upon him – he neither “lives” them, nor “passes” them, nor “spends” them. The following lines look to the past, when nineteen years earlier Yeats had made his first visit to Coole Park. Immediately, the passivity is broken. This does not happen, however, in the verbs ("I did my part", "saw" and "had finished well"), which hardly signify great activity; rather, the difference is reflected in the swans' response to the speaker's presence. In his youth (his relative youth: Yeats was thirty-two), the speaker disrupted the natural scene upon which he had stumbled. Before he could finish counting their number, he had them “scattered into great broken rings.” “Scattered,” “broken,” and “noisy” all suggest disorder: the swans have been frightened. (I suspect that the "great broken rings" also carry some hermetic charge, 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 poem. stanza; on the contrary, it disturbed him, it was a sign of discord. After two decades, he can count birds at his leisure. The swans, we discover, are sublimely indifferent: either the birds have become accustomed to the speaker's presence over the intervening years, or part of the loss lamented by the poem is figured in this inability to disrupt a natural order , a certain lost vigor and the threat that accompanies it. . The two explanations are not, I think, incompatible; Regardless, the “passion and conquest” he later envies in the swans are lost to the speaker. For the first two stanzas, the description of the swans is neutral, but admiration emerges in line thirteen, accompanied by the poem's central act of revelation: "I have looked at these bright creatures, / And now my heart aches. " The revelation stops the poem: it is the only sentence that ends in the middle of the stanza. The stanza resumes with an extraordinary execution of a sentence, a reflection, in its remarkably complicated syntax, of the temporal sequence which structures the poem: Everything has changed since I heard at dusk, The first time on this shore, The beat of their wings. above my head, walked with a lighter step. The syntax of line fifteen, embodying a particularly dramatic break in that it is between subject and verb, continues only after a three-line suspension. Furthermore, the interpolation itself is broken between the verb (“hear”) and the object. The main clause is “Everything has changed since I walked with a lighter step”; the subordinate clause is “hear at dusk the beating of their wings”; “the first time on this shore” qualifies both. The result is a braid whose shine masks what little information is actually conveyed. “Everything has changed,” the sentence declares, and the elaborate carryover of the verb promises a dramatic elaboration of the statement. We expect a psychological revelation commensurate with the effort of postponement. What comes, however, is - like the more direct "I have a pain in myheart” – quite conventional, as if a great difficulty had been approached, attempted and retreated. The information conveyed by the report does not seem to justify the force of its intrusion either; he repeats the scene already described in the second stanza, adding only that it also occurred at dusk. But what is important is that the swans have been transformed: whereas before they were only "noisy", the sound of their wings is now a "beat of a bell". This image receives the greatest aesthetic investment in the poem, evoking grandeur, solemnity and order. However, the poem runs into a problem. A verse walked on water; the speaker attempted a revelation strategy and failed. The fourth stanza returns the poem to the present scene and attempts a revelation through displacement, describing the swans in fully comprehensible terms. It only makes sense as a contrasting commentary on the speaker: "Always tireless, lover after lover, / They paddle in the cold/fellow streams or climb into the air. What is important here is not only the timelessness or resilient vitality of the swans (“tireless”), but also their freedom and aptitude for contrasting elements. “Companion” is the most striking word in these lines, and it emphasizes both the swans’ ease in their environment and, especially with “lover by lover,” the harmony and fullness of their society: each swan has his companion. The adjective is poignant, however, because we suspect that it characterizes a state different from that of the speaker; it’s a quiet revelation of one’s own loneliness. ("Lover by lover" prompts an untapped but, in my opinion, undeniable reminder of the number of swans given in line six: one of these creatures is missing its companion. Perhaps making this loss explicit would unfortunately tilt the poem towards the feeling, but the loss is nevertheless encoded.) This contrastive mode of reading is also imposed by the following line, which is triggered 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 discrete sentences. In this stanza, however, there are two semicolons; the syntax of the sentence is divided into three parts. The effect is to emphasize line twenty-two, a line which must receive its own and necessary scansion, a trochee for the first foot, in order to resonate with its own force: “Their hearts have not aged. » The third and final segment of the sentence imagines the fullness of the swans' lives: "Passion or conquest, wander where they will, / Watch them always." » A curious turning point was made by the recognition of line twenty-two: while the first three lines of the stanza celebrated the ease of life of the swans, their placidity and their society, the couplet on the contrary envies their capacity for disruption and even of violence: "passion" is not a word of the same order as "companion", nor even "lover by lover"; it denotes extremity and a loss of autonomy and ease. Likewise, "conquest" requires violence, or at least displacement – ​​an initial disquiet in the face of a new environment that is overcome by persistence or force These verses should, I think, shock: they are not the placid, loving swans that they are. one expects to find in the poems; instead, there is a suggestion of commendable violence, of the "raw blood of the air" which Yeats will evoke so powerfully in "Leda and the Swan". the swans' true freedom comes from the inevitability of the "passion and conquest" so necessary to their youthful hearts: they will find them "wandering where they will." The adversative with which line twenty-five begins suggests the attraction of swans..