To Endure the Timid Sun: Yeats and Aging in The Wild Swans at Coole
Yeats’ attitude towards growing old is clearly one of the major themes of the collection of poems he published in 1919, at the age of 54, entitled The Wild Swans at Coole. Nearly every poem in this collection refers, whether obliquely or directly, to aging as a central concern. It is a tribute to Yeats’ skill as a poet that his feelings about aging in the poems are considerably mixed. Three poems in particular (among others), “The Wild Swans at Coole,” “Men Improve with the Years,” and “Lines Written in Dejection,” deal directly and explicitly with the transience of youthful passion and the weight of time.
The tone of these poems is not hopeful, insofar as the future brings no chance of a revival for the narrator. What is lost cannot be regained, and there is no “something ere the end” as in Tennyson’s “Ulysses.” Yet despite this seeming despair, there is an undercurrent of acceptance, and to an even larger extent a belief in the “eternal verities” that transcend one short life. In these poems Yeats is affirming the passion that makes life worth living and at the same time mourning the necessary transience of those feelings. Perhaps the most moving aspect of these poems is the idea that dreams and passion are not tied to “dying animals,” but that instead they are forces in their own right, which can visit or leave us at their will.
This notion is presented most clearly in
“The Wild Swans at Coole," (Yeats 131) the title poem of the volume. The form of the poem is quite unique. The first four lines of each stanza comprise a quatrain ballad stanza. Each stanza, then, begins with iambic tetrameter alternating with iambic trimeter, rhyming abcb. But Yeats adds a concluding couplet to the ballad stanza:
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty swans.
The final two lines interrupt the typical quatrain ballad stanza, and the concluding couplets of each stanza almost serve as a refrain. As we will see, this form is crucial to the meaning of the poem.
According to A. Norman Jeffares, Yeats described the poem “as written in a mood of intense depression” (Jeffares 131). The opening stanza, containing images of a passing beauty, certainly supports that assertion. The opening images in the poem are of the final months of the year. The trees are in their “autumn beauty,” and the lake reflects an “October twilight.” The image of dry woodland paths suggests that there has been no rain for some time, and the still water and sky suggest a chilling emptiness. Even the hour of the day is late. The mood evoked by these images is not so much despair but a mournful knowledge that summer is over, and winter is coming. The autumn months bear traces of the glory of summer, which still lingers on into October. Unlike spring, autumn is associated with the transience of beauty and life, with death not birth.
These images and thoughts are notably interrupted by the first couplet. Fifty nine swans are “Upon the brimming water among the stones.” Significantly, the swans are not included in the initial scene described in the quatrain ballad stanza, but occupy their own space, apart from the traditional form employed at the start of the poem. Swans are a suggestive presence in Yeats’ poetry, and Rachel Billigheimer asserts that, for Yeats, “swans are for the most part associated with sorrow and yearning” (Billigheimer 55).
The second stanza follows an identical pattern as the first. The passage of time is now invoked by an “I,” a narrator who cannot finish counting the swans before they “scatter wheeling in great broken rings.” “Nineteen autumns” have passed since he first counted the swans. Jeffares writes, “Yeats was fifty-one when he wrote the poem, and realized how he had changed since, at the age of thirty-two, he first visited Lady Gregory at Coole Park” (Jeffares 130). This time, the narrator is again bound by the ballad stanza, while the swans fly away in the concluding couplet, and again they break away from the traditional form.
The third stanza finds the narrator again lamenting lost time. He remembers that “I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,” but “now my heart is sore.” Twilight is again invoked as the moment when the narrator first saw the swans take leave of him. The concluding couplet enforces yet again the separateness of the swans and the narrator. The fourth stanza describes the swans as “unwearied,” and notes that “Their hearts have not grown old.” Jeffares believes that at the time of writing “Yeats may have been troubled both by the death of his love for Maud Gonne and by the realization that Iseult Gonne, to whom he proposed marriage in 1916 and 1917, would think of him as an old man” (Jeffares 132). Indeed, the poem acts as a eulogy for a feeling, represented by the swans that Billigheimer refers to as “a symbol of eternal life, of permanent beauty and immutability” (Billigheimer 56). In a sense, the swans represent the permanent expression of a temporary feeling.
Even in the fourth stanza, which is entirely about the swans and not the narrator, Yeats uses the added couplet to stress the theme of the poem:
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.
These lines identify passion and conquest with the swans, and they also stress that these ideas will not leave the swans, “wander where they will.” It is unclear whether the “they” of the couplet refers to the swans or passion and conquest, but in either case the meaning is the same. And again the separateness is stressed by the added couplet. Passion and conquest, whether symbolized by the swans or merely associated with them, are independent forces, and even though the ballad stanza contains words and images that depict the swans’ un-aging hearts, as noted above, they only serve to unite the swans with the passion represented by the added couplet.
The fifth and final stanza finds that the swans have not yet taken their final leave of the narrator. The first line, “But now they drift on still water,” returns us to the present moment, rather than speculating on the future or mourning the past, as the earlier stanzas do. Aging, then, not old age, is the subject of this poem. An increasing awareness of mortality weighs upon the narrator, and in the poem he begins to mourn a past that is gone and even a present that is not yet past. But in the final stanza he entertains a sentiment of amazing generosity:
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?
In these lines the aging narrator of the autumn months looks forward to a spring that will not be his. He finds consolation in the fact that the passion represented by the swans will not die with him. They will fly away to delight another, and they will continue to inspire the young. And so “The Wild Swans at Coole” is at the same time a eulogy for youthful passion and also an acceptance of mortality. As Billigheimer writes, “Here the poet is expressing regret at his increasing age, but his ‘awakening’ paradoxically refers to his own death, since it is he who has departed from the world of the imperishable dream” (Billigheimer 57).
“Men improve with the Years” (Yeats 136) is an eighteen line poem that begins and ends with the same nearly identical three lines:
I am worn out with dreams;
A weather-worn, marble triton
Among the streams;
The poem ends with the last two lines exactly the same and the first changed to “But I grow old among dreams.” The rhyme scheme of the poem performs an interesting function. The beginning three lines rhyme aba but each proceeding group of four lines moves on from the rhyme of the last so that lines 3-7 rhyme cdcd and lines 8-12 rhyme efef , and so on until the end, when the rhyme finds itself, with a “But” negating all that has gone before, ending where it started: abc. The rhyme, just like the poem itself, documents a near escape from the sentiments of the first three lines. The poem is circular, ending exactly where it began, while it shows the attempt of the narrator to make peace with aging. The first line stands in direct contrast to the possibly self-mocking title. It is a powerful and moving line, but its meaning is ambiguous until the poem depicts yet another wearying dream.
“Men improve with the Years” is a devastating critique of the dreams we live by, the hopes and fantasies that protect us from the harsh logic of life and old age. The narrator is “worn out” and finds difficulty maintaining the illusion. He begins the poem as a “weather-worn, marble triton,” which Jeffares describes as “a statue of a Greek sea deity, usually represented with the upper parts of a man and a fish tail, holding a trumpet made from a conch shell” (Jeffares 139). The image is an interesting one, but difficult to interpret. Obviously, “streams” suggest the passage of time, and “weather-worn” suggests the slow erosion which only time and pressure can bring about. The function of the “marble triton,” certainly ambiguous, could perhaps be to represent the nature of the poet as a bulwark of those lofty ideals that everyday life has no time for. Like a marble statue, the poet stands amid the streams of time and proclaims these truths. Yet this statue is worn down by time, and the opening lines suggest, as does the entire poem, a disillusion with writing poetry.
These opening images may recall an aging wearied poet, but they are soon contrasted with the image of a beautiful young woman. The narrator admires the woman “As though I had found in a book a pictured beauty.” Interestingly, she is portrayed as an object to the narrator, something to be admired and contemplated. She serves this purpose for the narrator, who is “Delighted to be but wise” as he is able to entertain such lofty pleasures in his old age, “For men improve with the years.”
This sentiment is then interrupted:
And yet, and yet,
Is this my dream, or the truth?
The repetition movingly chronicles the demoralization that the narrator again begins to feel. He is happy to be free from the corporeal passions of youth, and yet he wonders if he is not kidding himself. The question is immediately answered with the following two lines:
O would that we had met
When I had my burning youth!
Passion erupts in these lines, which affirm that it is indeed a dream. Wisdom is now subordinated to physical passion, and the narrator rages against his impotence. At this point, with a “But,” the poem ends right back where it began: “A weather-worn, marble triton among the streams.” The narrator resigns to “grow old among dreams,” and this seems a poor consolation. The circular nature of the poem emphasizes the surge of feeling that it depicts. The subsequent retreat of the emotions into resignation is demonstrated by the repeated images of the opening three lines. The overall impact of the poem is to suggest the irreversible character of aging. More importantly, it depicts Yeats’ inability to embrace dreams at the expense of harsh reality. He is “worn out,” tired, and resigned to the bitter truth.
The title of “
Lines written in Dejection” (Yeats 145) promises to offer more of the general depression and resignation found in the previous two poems. And indeed it delivers on that promise by finally crystallizing the experience of growing old with a powerful image of despair. Like the previous two poems, “Lines written in Dejection” creates a dichotomy between the barrenness and impotence of old age and the “passion and conquest” of youth, this time represented, respectively, as the sun and the moon. The poem is eleven lines long and follows no recognizable rhyme scheme. Rather than using form to stress his theme Yeats employs a complex array of symbols. Chief among these are the oppositional sun and moon, and all of the vivid imagery of the poem can be separated into one of these two categories. In his book, W.B. Yeats, The Later Poetry, Thomas Parkinson identifies the sun and moon as among Yeats’ chief symbols. Parkinson creates a table with the separate associations of both the moon and the sun. Under “sun,” Parkinson includes words such as male, civilization, artificial, elaborate, rational, and objective. Under “moon,” he includes female, culture, natural, simple, emotional, and subjective (Parkinson 156).
The poem opens with the narrator attempting to recall the last time he saw “the dark leopards of the moon.” He finds that “all the wild witches” are gone. These are clearly images associated with the moon. The “wavering bodies” of the leopards suggests a feline (and feminine) beauty, and the witches evoke the occult with its attendant passion, emotion, and sensuality. The narrator also proclaims that “the holy centaurs of the hill are vanished.” Parkinson writes, “the centaurs as composite beings imply a possible resolution—more desirable than that of the conclusion—of the problem posed as the primary cause of dejection. They represent a desired transcendent unity of temporarily discordant and incompatible entities” (Parkinson 151).
If the centaur represents a balance between the elements of the moon and the sun then the poem speaks to an imbalance of those elements. Just as the rising sun chases away the creatures of the night, the sun in this poem chases away imagination and emotion. The narrator says, “I have nothing but the embittered sun.” The sun, a symbol of rationalism and objectivity, is “embittered” by the desolation it has wrought. The poem makes its subject clear with the penultimate line: “And now that I have come to fifty years.” Yeats represents the process of aging as the slow banishment of the moon by the sun. All the magic and wonder associated with the moon is replaced by the rational light of the sun. Because Yeats depicts the moon as lost, and not the sun, he makes a critical distinction. Rather than celebrating the bright light of the sun that makes it possible to see things clearly, Yeats mourns the night, which hides objects in shadows, and allows for imagination. The reason of old age, then, chases away the passion of youth.
By associating the moon with creatures such as leopards, (surely not present in Ireland) witches, and centaurs (surely not present anywhere) Yeats highlights the fact that the sun represents truth and objectivity. These qualities, however, are not celebrated in the poem. Indeed, Yeats calls the sun “timid” and “embittered.” These words suggest that reason is a poor consolation for growing old, and much like “Men Improve with the Years” the benefits of aging are thrown into serious doubt. The poem reflects the heartbreaking impossibility of illusion for its author. The man who wrote “The Stolen Child” can no longer follow his own advice and escape in fantasy. He resolves to “endure” but it is hard to read the final line of the poem as hopeful determination. Instead, it is a sigh of resignation, and so the poem joins “The Wild Swans at Coole” and “Men Improve with the Years” as an expression of the diminishing satisfaction of being alive.
The three poems discussed here offer, on the surface, a disconsolate attitude towards aging. It is important to recognize this quality, and to face up to the disillusion represented in the poems. Yeats half-heartedly admits the gains acquired by old age: reason, objectivity, the calm comfort of a lack of passion. These are poor consolation, however, compared to the dreams of youth. They are to be endured, not celebrated. Parkinson refers to The Wild Swans at Coole as “dead ends to a barren passion” (Parkinson 45). But, for Yeats, one is not left with nothing. While all three poems suggest that the passions of youth cannot return, all three also suggest the beautiful idea that these passions are forces in their own right. There is a belief in the necessary transience of these feelings represented by the resolve to endure. Parkinson remarks that the poems in The Wild Swans at Coole are “ungrudging acts of generosity that form necessary elements in a design that has to be brought to term and fullness” (Parkinson 45). There is an unavoidable sense that this is the way things must be, and it is good and right, if painful.
Perhaps the most remarkable quality of these poems is Yeats unflinching portrayal of aging. He offers no false consolations to the reader or himself. Instead, in a poem entitled “Broken Dreams,” he proclaims that all we have are “Vague memories, nothing but memories.” And that is certainly something. But above all the poems stand as an expression of feelings associated with the autumn months of our life, and while they movingly grapple with mortality, they also paradoxically celebrate the “passion and conquest” of youth. Wisdom tells us that all things must pass, but our hearts refuse to forget. The poet has the ability to make feelings and moments immortal through verse, and so he eases the sad burden of a long life with beauty and remembrance.
