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William Butler YeatsA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Undeniably, William Butler Yeats, the presumptive speaker in the poem, is sad. It is autumn, late in the day, and he is feeling his age. He is outside and chilled, and more important, looking back over his long life, he is suddenly full of regrets, his heart “sore” (Line 14). Nature, embodied by the park’s herd of swans, seems ever animated and ever robust despite the October chill. And those swans paddling absently about the cold lake seem happily indifferent to his broodings.
Yet there is a kind of gorgeous majesty to Yeats’s melancholy, a kind of giddy egotism about his pensiveness. Yes, he is past 50 at a time when that was considered old age. Yet, as he notes along the lake at Coole Park, given the beauty and grace of the swans, still there after 19 years, he cannot help but feel vulnerable, fragile. However, in following the line of argument of Yeats’s meditation, stanza to stanza, the poem offers a sweeping counterargument that climaxes in the closing stanza’s rhetorical question, a question that ultimately empowers Yeats the poet, if not Yeats the man.
It is important first to note that in 1916 when Yeats first drafted the poem, he was, to be generous, considered a minor poet, known mostly in Ireland, a marginal figure in the rediscovery of Irish culture and heritage that blossomed in Ireland in the latter decades of the 19th century, a cultural movement called by its most passionate advocates the Celtic Revival.
By William Butler Yeats
Among School Children
Among School Children
William Butler Yeats
A Prayer for My Daughter
A Prayer for My Daughter
William Butler Yeats
A Vision
A Vision: An Explanation of Life Founded upon the Writings of Giraldus and upon Certain Doctrines Attributed to Kusta Ben Luka
William Butler Yeats
Cathleen Ni Houlihan
Cathleen Ni Houlihan
William Butler Yeats
Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop
Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop
William Butler Yeats
Death
Death
William Butler Yeats
Easter, 1916
Easter, 1916
William Butler Yeats
Leda and the Swan
Leda and the Swan
William Butler Yeats
No Second Troy
No Second Troy
William Butler Yeats
Sailing to Byzantium
Sailing to Byzantium
William Butler Yeats
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
William Butler Yeats
The Second Coming
The Second Coming
William Butler Yeats
When You Are Old
When You Are Old
William Butler Yeats