The Wild Swans at Coole

Composed in 1916, during the heyday of the young Modernist poets who campaigned against inherited poetic forms as anachronistic and championed radical experiments in prosody, “The Wild Swans at Coole” is strikingly out of step with that bold crusade. In its form and meter, the poem reflects the respect that the 50-something William Butler Yeats had for the disciplined structure of the iconic poets of the 19th century. By the standards of his own era, Yeats’s poem is unconventionally conventional.

The poem is executed in five six-line stanzas, known as sestets. Each line follows, with some degree of variation, iambic meter, using the traditional two-beat unit of unaccented followed by accented beat, duh-DUH, which matches conversational patterns. The first and third lines of each stanza have four such two-beat units; Lines 2, 4, and 6 have three such units; and the closing line of each stanza has five such units. The rhyme scheme in each stanza follows the tight ABCBDD patterning.

Given the poet/speaker’s melancholy musing, the poem would easily have sustained so-called free-verse or open-verse form. Yeats’s decision to execute the poem with strict attention to inherited poetics underscores the poem’s theme that within the chaos and confusion of time, art (the discipline of artisanship itself) offers the sole possibility of redemption through the