Composed and published in 1917, this title poem of the 1919 book “The Wild Swans at Coole” appears alongside such other famous poems by William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) as “The Scholars” and “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death,” both of which have appeared previously as New York Sun Poems of the Day. As guest editor Phil Klay noted of the latter poem, a “darker, more muted register” informs this whole work by an aging poet. Exhausted by the specter of violence, both worldwide and in Ireland (with its Easter Uprising of 1916), and rejected in love by the uprising’s icon, Maude Gonne, and her daughter Iseult, the Yeats of this book is sadly “knowing . . . maybe even too knowing.”

“The Wild Swans at Coole,” written when Yeats was 51, begins in the grief of a phase of life when a man might start to feel that he has lived too long and known too much. Set in autumn, the poem observes the cyclical nature of time, with its fixed course of seasons. Paradoxically, it also observes a reality which seems to move outside time, embodied both in the currents and in the comings and goings of the swans. The scene, as the speaker recounts it, in sestets whose tetrameter is disrupted by a penultimate line of pentameter, is one of changelessness which is nevertheless always changing.

The man on the shore, aware of the familiar autumn that has come round again for the nineteenth time in that familiar place, intuits his own mutability and mortality. Though he stands in a fixed place observing movement, it’s he himself, not the swans, who will one day have “flown away,” to see them no more. The swans, on the other hand, appear immortal: “Their hearts have not grown old.” In due course they will “delight men’s eyes” on some other shore, to which they, in their freedom from time, will have wandered. 

The Wild Swans at Coole
by William Butler Yeats

The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty swans.

The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.

Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.

But now they drift on the still water,
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake’s edge or pool
Delight men’s eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.