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William Butler Yeats
Some people say that change is inevitable. The famous Irish poet, William Butler Yeats was plagued throughout his life by aging, change, and a broken heart from the woman he adored, Maud Gonne. In his famous poem entitled “The Wild Swans at Coole”, Yeats expresses his distaste for change and aging through the eternal life that the swans possess.
William Butler Yeats proposed to his love Maud Gonne and was denied for the final time right before he wrote the poem “The Wild Swans at Coole”. He realized he was getting older and this may be his last chance to court her. “Maud Gonne was the daughter of an English colonel and put all her efforts to the cause of Irish Nationalism. Yeats met her for the first time in 1889 when she visited his father’s home in Bedford Park” (Bushrui and Prentki, 60). He immediately fell in love with her and her breathe-taking beauty. She was recognized as one of the most beautiful women in all of Ireland. Yeats wrote various poems about her and his hopeless love for her such as “No Second Troy”, “Adam’s Curse”, and she portrayed a rose in his earlier poetry. “Although Yeats mentions Maud Gonne by name only once in his poetry, her presence dominates much of his verse” (Conner 72).Yeats proposed to her over and over again, and was denied every time. She had a tremendous influence over Yeats, his life, and his works. “She was destined to change his whole attitude to life” (Bushrui and Prentki, 60). Gonne married
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Major John MacBride in 1903, but this did not last as the marriage ended two years later. Yeats still persisted and renewed his proposal to her. She denied him again, but they still remained close friends through all of this. Yeats would eventually lose his passion for chasing Maud Gonne and settle down with a woman named Georgie Hyde-Lees.
The poem takes place in a spot that Yeats went to frequently called Coole Park, which was an estate owned by Lady Augusta Gregory. Coole Park was a very beautiful place. Lady Gregory was an “author, playwright, and a guiding light of the Abbey Theatre” (Conner 77). Coole Park “consisted of close to four thousand acres, which consisted of a large wooded area” (Conner 32). Yeats first went there in the summer of 1895 when he was thirty years old and continued to go there for the next twenty years. There was a great lake, which was fairly close to the house. Yeats counted the abundant amount of swans that were in the lake, which always seemed to baffle him. These swans as well as the countless times he was rejected by Maud Gonne, account for him writing his poem “The Wild Swans at Coole”.
The poem entitled “The Wild Swans at Coole” displays Yeats’ longing for staying young and not changing. Yeats starts out by describing the trees which “are in [next page]