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.
A summary of a classic Yeats poem by Dr Oliver Tearle
‘Among School Children’ is one of W. B. Yeats’s great late poems. Like another of his famous poems from this stage of his life, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, the poem is about Yeats looking back on his own life and feeling increasingly out of touch with the modern world. Here we offer a short summary and analysis of ‘Among School Children’, highlighting some of its major themes.
Among School Children
I
I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;
A kind old nun in a white hood replies;
The children learn to cipher and to sing,
To study reading-books and history,
To cut and sew, be neat in everything
In the best modern way—the children’s eyes
In momentary wonder stare upon
A sixty-year-old smiling public man.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Long-Legged Fly’ is one of the great poems about silence. Silence is found elsewhere in Yeats’s work – in ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, for instance, he longs to escape to the tranquillity of the isle mentioned in that poem’s title – but ‘Long-Legged Fly’ is about, in Yeats’s own words, how the mind moves upon silence. Here is the poem, along with a brief analysis of its meaning.
Long-Legged Fly
That civilisation may not sink,
Its great battle lost,
Quiet the dog, tether the pony
To a distant post;
Our master Caesar is in the tent
Where the maps are spread,
His eyes fixed upon nothing,
A hand under his head.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Leda and the Swan’ (published in 1924) is one of W. B. Yeats’s most widely anthologised poems. The poem, which somewhat unusually for Yeats is a sonnet, is about the ravishing of the Greek girl Leda by the god Zeus, who has assumed the form of a swan. Here is ‘Leda and the Swan’ and some notes towards an analysis of this intriguing and enigmatic Yeats poem.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Growing older, feeling out of touch with the new generation superseding you, feeling surplus to requirements, waiting for death. These are, perhaps, inevitable thoughts once we reach a certain age: they certainly came to Yeats in his later years, and he frequently wrote about growing old. (See ‘Among School Children’ for another notable example.)