By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Wild Swans at Coole’ is the opening, title poem in W. B. Yeats’s 1917 poetry collection The Wild Swans at Coole. Perhaps the best way to offer an analysis of ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’ is to take the poem a stanza at a time, and summarise what’s going on and what feelings Yeats is articulating through the imagery of the swans.