'The Wild Swans at Coole' by William Butler Yeats is a classical in its smoothness and lucidity. It shows the influence of Wordsworth in that the poet here uses Nature as a medium to convey personal emotion. What however distinguishes from the poems of Wordsworth is its mood. The poet, who is now old, looks at the familiar spectacre of 59 swans moving together in loving pairs or flying up on noisy winds. This spectacle makes him brood on the change that time has wrought in him, while the birds are patently untouched by it:
Their hearts have not grown old
Passion and conquest
In the background of this lament lies Yeat's frustration in love for MaudGone and her daughter IsaualtGonne. The poem runs on the contrast between the change which has come over the poet, and the wild spirits of the swans which has denied the effects of time. In one sense, the swans stand for life-force: there hearts have not grown old, and they find the stream companionable despite its coldness. In another sense, they stand for the union of time and the timeless. The poet has seen these swans for 19 years. But all on a sudden they start scattering away, wheeling in great broken winds upon their clamorous wings. In the past he used to look upon those creatures with joy and pleasure but now his heart is sour. The swans remind of his former freshness and his youth and make him despondent.
However, to consider the Wild Swans at Coole as a poem of personal unhappiness, which is described against a background of nature, would be overlooking the other possible interpretations. The poem also deals with death and immortality. The 'Swans in the The Coole Park and Ballyle' may not be equivated with the soule: but their flight from earth to sky may be said to represent "Immortality". They unite the time with the timeless and the temporal with the eternal. They are symbolic of live-force and of poetic inspiration or imagination. They are vigorous and powerful.
Keats’ poetry explores many issues and themes, accompanied by language and technique that clearly demonstrates the romantic era. His poems ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and ‘Bright Star’ examine themes such as mortality and idealism of love. Mortality were common themes that were presented in these poems as Keats’ has used his imagination in order to touch each of the five senses. He also explores the idea that the nightingale’s song allows Keats to travel in a world of beauty. Keats draws from mythology and christianity to further develop these ideas. Keats’ wrote ‘Ode To A Nightingale’ as an immortal bird’s song that enabled him to escape reality and live only to admire the beauty of nature around him. ‘Bright Star’ also discusses the immortal as Keats shows a sense of yearning to be like a star in it’s steadfast abilities. The visual representation reveal these ideas as each image reflects Keats’ obsession with nature and how through this mindset he was able
Like “On the Departure of the Nightingale”, the flight of the bird also symbolizes the removal of the song, and the loss of the creative force for the poet; the nightingale is free to escape from a world of decay and death, while the poet is forced to suffer in it.
The hero’s lament of not having an heir is but one of many dozens of sorrows in this poetic classic, which balance with numerous joys expressed on alternate pages. This essay expresses but a selection of joys and sorrows from among the almost countless number existing in the poem.
William Butler Yeats is a famous Irish poet, yet as a student he did not do so well in his Math and English course. During his education, it was known that he did remarkably poor in mathematics and language as student. Is that surprising that a well-known poet, such as William, to be a poet if he did not do well in language? As being a famous poet for what he is known for now, one must expect that he would succeed well in just category. However, not everyone success was built on success. The life of William Butler Yeats, from his childhood years, to early life, and later life made him the person who people has known him as of now, a famous Irish poet.
William Butler Yeats One of Ireland's finest writers, William Butler Yeats served a long apprenticeship in the arts before his genius was fully developed. He did some of his greatest work after he was fifty. Yeats was born in Dublin, Ireland, on June 13, 1865. His father was a lawyer-turned-Irish painter. In 1867 the family followed him to London and settled in Bedford Park.
of 4 line stanzas. It has a traditional rhyme scheme consisting of ABAB CDCD EFG EFG. It is interesting in the fact that 4 of the rhymes aren't perfect: "push" "rush" and "up" "drop." The poem starts out aggressive and ends in a passive tone. Words used to describe Leda directly were: "the staggering girl" "her thighs" "her nape" "her helpless breast" and "her loosening thighs." An indirect word describing Leda is "terrified vague fingers." Indirect words used to describe the swan indirectly were: "great wing" "dark webs" "that white rush" "blood" "indifferent beak" "feathered glory." Direct terms used to describe the swan were "wings" "bill" and "beak." The swan was never actually called Zeus or even the swan in the poem. Agamemnon was the only name to be mentioned in the poem.
Keats begins with the poem with a question, “O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, alone and palely loitering?”. He does this to ask the “knight-at-arms” what has made him this weak, this pale, dying in a field somewhere and the knight’s answer takes up the rest of the poem. The imagery in my visual representation depicting a heart broken and weakened by the icy, deceptive lips of ‘femme fatale’ is both powerful and highly symbolic because it expresses the coldness and the deviousness of the deceptive witch that has weakened the knight. The icy cold lips of the witch symbolise her deceptive nature, and the way she tricks the knight into a deathly sleep, which is also visualised in my representation. His deathly sleep is also represented in a ‘before/after’ representation in which an image of the beautiful woman in the meadows is shown, and after his nightmare, the icy cold, desolate and dark hill side upon which the knight awakes is shown in the neighbouring image. The speaker says that the "sedge" have all died out from around the lake, and "no birds sing”. We can deduce that it 's autumn since all the birds have migrated, and the plants have “withered." The speaker continues to address this sick, depressed "knight at arms." He asks about the "lily" on the knight 's "brow," suggesting that the knight 's face is pale like a lily.
William Butler Yeats was born on June thirteenth, eighteen sixty-five, at ten-forty pm, in Sandymount, Dublin (Foster, 13). He grew up lanky, untidy, slightly myopic, and extremely thin. He had black hair, high cheek bones, olive skin, and slanting eyes (Foster, 34). It was presumed he was Tubercular. As a child he was ridiculed, mainly because of his Irish heritage (Foster, 16). He accomplished many things in his life time.
Arguably one of John Keats’ most famous poems, “Ode to a nightingale” in and of itself is an allegory on the frail, conflicting aspects of life while also standing as a commentary on the want to escape life’s problems and the unavoidability of death. Keats’ poem utilizes a heavy amount of symbolism, simile and allusion to idealize nature as a perfect, almost mystical, world that holds no problems while using imagery taken from nature, combined with alliteration and assonance, to idealize the dream of escape from the problems life often presents; more specifically, aging and our inevitable deaths by allowing the reader to feel as if they are experiencing the speaker’s experience listening to the nightingale.
Yeats, W. B. The Wild Swans at Coole. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1919; Bartleby.com, 1999.
Author of poetry, William Butler Yeats, wrote during the twentieth century which was a time of change. It was marked by world wars, revolutions, technological innovations, and also a mass media explosion. Throughout Yeats poems he indirectly sends a message to his readers through the symbolism of certain objects. In the poems The Lake Isle of Innisfree, The wild Swans at Cole, and Sailing to Byzantium, all by William Yeats expresses his emotional impact of his word choices and symbolic images.
The consistent pattern of metrical stresses in this stanza, along with the orderly rhyme scheme, and standard verse structure, reflect the mood of serenity, of humankind in harmony with Nature. It is a fine, hot day, `clear as fire', when the speaker comes to drink at the creek. Birdsong punctuates the still air, like the tinkling of broken glass. However, the term `frail' also suggests vulnerability in the presence of danger, and there are other intimations in this stanza of the drama that is about to unfold. Slithery sibilants, as in the words `glass', `grass' and `moss', hint at the existence of a Serpent in the Garden of Eden. As in a Greek tragedy, the intensity of expression in the poem invokes a proleptic tenseness, as yet unexplained.
Wordsworth and Hopkins both present the reader with a poem conveying the theme of nature. Nature in its variety be it from something as simple as streaked or multicolored skies, long fields and valleys, to things more complex like animals, are all gifts we take for granted. Some never realize the truth of what they are missing by keeping themselves indoors fixating on the loneliness and vacancy of their lives and not on what beauty currently surrounds them. Others tend to relate themselves more to the fact that these lovely gifts are from God and should be praised because of the way his gifts have uplifted our human spirit. Each writer gives us their own ideals as how to find and appreciate nature’s true gifts.
This poem that I am going to be focusing on is titled "Ode to Autumn",
On the surface, William Butler Yeats’s poem No Second Troy, tells the narrative of a man questioning his unrequited love, morality and ideology. However, further reading of the poem gives the reader insight into Yeats’s own feelings towards Irish radical, Maud Gonne, a woman to whom he proposed on numerous occasions unsuccessfully. Gonne had always been more radical than Yeats within her efforts to secure Ireland’s independence from Britain in the first decades of the 20th century, but Yeats persisted in receiving her love, dedicating many of his poems to her, thus showing his obsession with the radical actress. The poem can be split into four rhetorical questions; first the speaker asks “why” he should blame her, for his own unhappiness; next he questions “what” else she could have done with her “noble” mind; following this, the speaker, seemingly speaking to himself, accepts that she is who she is and that cannot be changed, lastly the speaker questions whether there is anything else that could have been an outlet for her “fiery” temperament. Initially, the poem can be viewed as a sonnet, however, true sonnets contain fourteen lines, in contrast to No Second Troy’s twelve, thus making it a douzaine.