People think history always repeats itself. Usually they become attached to some event from the past to the point that they cannot function in their own context of history. People remain fixated on these past events, preventing them to carry on and accompany history in their lives. Despite the general assumption that history repeats itself, the development of events in personal history can shape oneself in various ways. Main characters could be strangers in the course of those happenings while occurring. Nonetheless, W. B. Yeats seems to be playing intrinsically the role of a main character in The Wild Swans at Coole.[1]The poet himself urges his inner-self to connect with something known to him and opines through expressing his feelings at the time of execution. He returns to a place where his eternal love began, the place where long ago a woman declined the privilege to share her love with him. It is the writer’s poetic persona that emanates and denotes the feelings of new and numerous deceptions. Environmental and personal issues clash altogether.
At the time that W. B. Yeats wrote the poem, a series of catastrophic international, national, and personal events took place shaping and forging his mindset. The world around him was facing a generalized commotion and his writing was affected by all the generalized commotion. The end of the First World War was an obscure shadow ever-present; the death of Hugh Lane, the threatened dismemberment of Lady Gregory’s estate, the death of Maud Gonne’s husband and her final rejection of Yeats’ proposal, Iseult Gonne’s rejection of him, his hasty marriage, and the death of Robert Gregory. These events instated Yeats a need to seek refuge within himself. All that it was known to the poet was no longer present, or it was about to collapse. In spite of the chaos through which he lived, these were immensely productive years for his prose.[2]
Surrounded by instability, Yeats emotionally embarks readers on an ironical and melancholic voyage of deception and redemption of a past confused and infused with current events. He encounters a recurrent possibility to be closer to the woman he profoundly loves. However, Yeats faces once again, her refusal fueling his inner artistic inspiration. This repeated event turned out to become the main idea in a poem devoted to become a metaphor of the passing of time.
W. B. Yeats saw human history as governed by the turning of a Great Wheel, whose phases influence events and determine human personalities – rather like the signs of the Zodiac in astrology. Every two thousand years comes a horrendous moment: the Wheel completes a turn; one civilization ends and another begins. Strangely, a new age is always announced by birds and by acts of violence.[3]
The Wild Swans at Cooledepicts swans as superb birds that are ironically defined as a wild animal. Throughout the entire poem, swans diffuse with the idea of an elegant and pure woman. As readers observe the poem closely, it becomes more apparent that Yeats desires to metaphorically describe these birds so that the description implies a specific person. As he clearly denotes in the third sestet in the 13thline when he says: “I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,”the poet exalts the pureness of swans by personifying them as human creatures. When Yeats wrote his piece, it was a critical time in which chaos brought out the worse of humans. This chameleonic movement resulted in a reaction that brought people to the extreme of their natural state, causing people’s return to their wild nature to resurface. Moreover, Coole is not a natural park but an artificial one. By contrasting purity with wildness, and the natural with artificial, the poet ironically emphasizes the ambivalence between the two, disorienting readers to convey the true meaning of the poem.
Time is a biological cycle to keep correlation of time. Past events could be engraved in one-self, enabling people to untie themselves from the mortifying net of memories. Yeats is still abased to see these fifty-nine swans after nineteen years. It seems to him that he had changed with the pass of time, but the swans miraculously defy time. Swans give to him the illusion of immortality: “Their hearts have not grown old.” Now he is an older man and the “woodland paths are dry,” (Yeats, line 2)but these birds are the same as before. He is the one that changed as time has changed him.
Melancholy plays an important role in this piece written by W. B. Yeats. Besides the fact of the meaning of Coole Park as the estate in western Ireland of Lady Augusta Gregory, the most important fact is that his visit took place in autumn and during twilight. From the first sestet, readers grasp the idea of melancholic rhythm as it becomes more emphasized in lines 3 and 4. By means of run-on-lines, the poet gathers all the elements when describing a melancholic situation. Therefore, October twilight accentuates the idea of solitude and time to think about the past. The metaphor “the water mirrors a still sky” (Yeats, line 3-4) refers to the swans and the mystical idea that still waters and still sky can be part of swans as they can live in both elements: water and air.
The Wild Swans at Coolecontains numerical symbols of great importance for the poet, and yet seems to leave doubts about the importance of them. Firstly, W. B. Yeats recurs to nine-and-fifty swans to invert numbers as known. This break down could imply the fact that there are nine swans in the one side and fifty in the other side. By means of denotation, readers are able to notice an implication or inflection of prior knowledge of the real existence of fifty-nine swans in the park. Secondly, the poet introduces the number nineteen to explicitly denote the fact that he knows how long it has been since he last visited Coole Park. These numerical symbols in this poem are a way to denote an implication imparted by the poet when describing time and events happening in extreme detail as being controlled and manipulated by him.
The Wild Swans at Cooleis divided into five stanzas. Each sestet stanza stresses the latter as creating a crescendo of suspense up to the final line. It is Yeats’s voice that speaks throughout the entire poem. His persona carries his own voice. By means of run-on-lines, the poet clearly reinforces the statement presented as he contrasted the still sky on the first sestet with the still water on the fourth sestet. Repetitive ideas of the passing of time and unconcluded past events thathaunt him are present in the third sestet when he refers as seeing those creatures “And now my heart is sore. All’s changed since […].”(Yeats, lines 14-15) This always-present past seems to be tormenting him and leaves him restless until he reaches the peak in the last sestet. The question of the last line could be observed as a way to leave readers a moment of reflection, or it could unify the idea of immortality. He wakes up to a possible death to find the pattern of immortality “flown away,” as he himself has reached immortality.[4]
The ending question and swans becomes a recurrent idea in the author’s new way of writing poetry. In Leda and the Swans[5], also written W. B. Yeats, the swans are present in conjunction with the mythological character Leda. The Greek god Zeus took the form of a swan and sexually assaulted Leda. The result was the birth of Helen of Troy from an egg. Since Helen’s beauty was one of the causes of the Trojan War, her conception caused “the burning roof and tower / And Agamemnon’s dead.” (Yeats, line 5) Agamemnon, Helen’s brother in law and commander of the Greek army at Troy, was murdered after the war by Helen’s sister, Clytemnestra.[6]This recurring idea of swans intensifies the fact that they become a symbol to the poet. They are continuously applied in the poetic rhetorical metaphor as a distinctive personification of a specific character in mind. While in The Wild Swans at Coolereserves a sacred place holding remembrance of past events, Leda and the Swansalludes to a savage or brutal connotation, full of carnal instincts as the swan sexually offends Leda. Swans become a symbol of pure and carnal desire through the two poems’ juxtaposition of these ideas. On addition to the swans, the final question is also present in this poem, acting as a poet’s final call of attention.
As the swans fly away, the image of immortality remains impressed vividly in W. B. Yeats world of symbols. Past events seem to be designing his future path. Either his lover represented as a swan or himself to brutally attack his lover; swans became part of Yeats’s arsenal. It might be possible to assume that the poet became, once again, alienated in his own discomfort of past events as he recurrently makes allusion to certain time in his own history. Due to this fact, Yeats hides himself in a Mask[7]in order not to face tormenting events from the past that prevent him to reach immortality. Those Maskscontribute to forget how intrinsically attached he remains to these recurring events. By means of a Mask, Yeats persists with the development of a theory that could no longer be identified to his preceding work. All in all, it might seem that Yeats hold on in time.
In a way, Yeats embraces to the idea of his greatest deception of non-corresponded love as a vampire does idolize a neck. He remains attached to the idea of a heart broken person seeking for a meaning to face future outcomes. As a result, he develops a mechanical repetitive action like Penelope does while awaits endlessly. Affected by his own time in history, W. B. Yeats’s ironical repetition makes readers to believe that he is constantly knitting and unknotting a long wool scarf of self-pities. Nowadays, we are those seeking refuge contained and restrained within ourselves hoping, with or without hope, a new spectrum of life as a ray of light resurges in an afar horizon promising a new beginning. A re-born mode of living auspice the inner-explored possibility of a real change within one self. Poetic rhetorical metaphors could no longer be plausible ways of approaching life as superficialities evanescence during harsh times and a living hope arises the true meaning of life. Conducting us all towards a communal collaborative meaning focused on us as human beings and nature, to which we are all intertwined and inter-correlated as natural elements. Being wild or even swans, we are all embarked into a journey on turbulent waters that ironically repeat themselves as life reiterates once one forget past sufferings adjusting rapidly to prosperous times, obliterating the true importance of those important facts respected and admired believing one had experienced afar during harsh times. Let us hope not to surpass those experienced momenta, in the near future, of ironic repetition remembrances while remembering all in part as a winner forget a defeated battle and relates to it by enunciating victory with a forceful voice of an erroneous triumphant. Memory long lasts those willing to remember. Otherwise, history repeats itself as it is written by victors. Let us call it ironic other than repeating constantly, swans govern our planet, wildly or naturally artificially, in lakes not only in Coole.
[1]Ferguson, Margaret, Salter, Mary Jo and Jon Stallworthy. The Norton Anthology of Poetry. (New York: Norton & Company Ltd.). 2005. 5thEd. Pg. 1192.
[2]Unterecker, John. A Reader’s Guide to William Butler Yeats. (Syracuse: Syracuse UP) 1996. Pg. 130-156.
[3]Gioia, Dana and X. J. Kennedy. An Introduction to Poetry. (New York: Pearson Longman). 2005. Pg. 286.
[4]Beaty, Jerome and William H. Matchett. Poetry: From Statement to Meaning. (New york: Oxford UP). 1965.
[5]Mayes, Frances. The Discovery of Poetry. (San Francisco: Harcourt Brace Javanovich, Inc.). 1978. Pg. 5
[6]Mayes, Frances. The Discovery of Poetry. (San Francisco: Harcourt Brace Javanovich, Inc.). 1978. Pg. 5
[7]Yeats, William Buttler – The Mask- Collected Plays of W.B. Yeats. London: Macmillan, 1952. Print.