The Wild Swans at Coole

Theme: This poem is a meditation on the passage of time, loneliness and the desire for love. The ageing process was one of Yeatss recurring obsessions. He was fifty-one years old when he wrote this poem in October 1916 and he had long since begun to feel that time was running out. He was unmarried, despite persistent efforts over the years to win the heart of Maud Gonne. In desperation, he would turn in 1917 to her daughter, Iseult, who was twenty-nine years his junior. She, too, rejected him. Within a matter of days, he proposed marriage to Georgie Hyde-Lees, the daughter of a friend, and twenty-seven years his junior. They married three weeks later. The poem contrasts his mortality and his inability to forge a lasting relationship with the swans seeming immortality and their practice of remaining loyal to their mate for life. The autumnal setting of the opening verse is significant: the October twilight suggests that not only are the day and the year drawing to a close but that life itself is approaching its end. Yeats is painfully aware that in the nineteen years he has been visiting Coole Park, the Galway home of his friend, Lady Gregory, he has made little or no progress in his emotional life. In the second verse, the poets heart is sore because of the passage of time and his lack of romantic success. The sound of the swans wings resembles a bell-beat above his head as though they are reminding him that the years are passing quickly. He contrasts his loneliness with the swans that swim lover by lover in the companionable streams. Unlike Yeatss heart, their hearts have not grown old. Unlike Yeatss empty life, theirs is filled with passion or conquest. The poem concludes with a verse that suggests the swans have a sense of purpose in life. They build nests and move from place to place and delight mens eyes. Yeats, by contrast, has built no nest, has no family or lover and lacks a real purpose in life.

An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

Theme: This poem is an elegy whose theme is the search for a sense of purpose and fulfilment in life.

The Irish airman of the poem is Major Robert Gregory, the son of Yeatss friend and collaborator, Lady Gregory, who was killed when his plane was shot down accidentally over Padua in Italy in January 1918. Lady Gregory asked Yeats to write a poem in his honour: If you feel like it sometime write something down that we may keep you understood him better than many. In fact, according to Roy Fosters biography of Yeats, the poet was never particularly close to Robert Gregory and appears on occasions to have been dismissive of him. In addition, there were tensions between Yeats and Gregorys wife who seemed to resent Yeatss frequent summer visits to the family home in Coole Park. However, despite his reservations, Yeats wrote four poems about Gregory whom he described later as a man of considerable talent: He had so many sides painter, classical scholar, scholar in painting and in modern literature, boxer, horseman, airman...

An elegy is a poem written to mark the death of a person who played an important part in the life of the poet or in the life of the nation. Usually, the poet will heap praise on the dead person, will recall his generosity and bravery, will remind the reader of his sweet and noble nature and tactfully gloss over any faults he may have had. In the case of a soldier, you might expect the elegy to emphasise the mans heroism. Yeatss approach is unusual because he ignores the normal conventions of the elegy.

Firstly, the poem is written as though Gregorys death has not yet occurred it is simply an event somewhere in the future. Secondly, instead of using the third person (he), Yeats adopts the first person (I know...) and speaks in the voice of Robert Gregory. It is as if we are exploring the dead mans thought processes. Thirdly, the tone of the poem is brutally direct and presents Gregory in an unglamorous and curiously disengaged way. It opens suddenly, as if a friend has decided to make a frightening admission: I know that I shall meet my fate/Somewhere among the clouds above. The honest confessions follow one by one as if the speaker has realised that time is running out. Gregorys bravery as a soldier had earned him the Military Cross and the Lgion dhonneur but Yeats chooses to ignore these achievements and presents Gregory as someone who has no clear idea why he is involved in the war. He has Gregory admit that he neither loves the people he guards, nor hates those against whom he fights. His loyalty, he says, is to the local people of Kiltartan, down the road from his home in Coole Park. He knows that their lives will be completely unaffected by the war, whatever the outcome. His motivation seems a mystery: Nor law nor duty bade me fight, nor public men, nor cheering crowds. So what was it that made him risk his life if he was not compelled by law (conscription) or a sense of duty or the rousing speeches of politicians or the admiration of the cheering public? In line 11, Yeats tells us that what drove him was A lonely impulse of delight. This appears to mean that his actions were motivated by the sheer pleasure of the act of flying itself. As a WWI pilot, he would usually have been the sole occupant of his plane and therefore solely responsible for his own safety. The adrenalin-rush of flying these early planes, accentuated by the knowledge that the next mission could be ones last, has the effect of focusing the mind on what is important and what is not. It is as if he is spellbound by the combination of speed, altitude and danger and sees life in a moment of clarity: The years to come seemed waste of breath, A waste of breath the years behind In balance with this life, this death. Life, he seems to conclude, is not worth living if one is constantly either looking to the future or recalling the past: what matters is living each moment to its fullest, and this happens most often in those moments where life and death are balanced precariously. This lack of concern for living a safe life and the imminence of death confers a heroic stature on the airman. His disregard for the normal conventions regarding war raises him above the mass of common soldiers to the point where his attitude to life becomes a form of artistic expression.