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 […]
Tag: WB Yeats
A Short Analysis of W. B. Yeats’s ‘Among School Children’
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 […]
A Short Analysis of W. B. Yeats’s ‘Long-Legged Fly’
A summary of a classic Yeats poem by Dr Oliver Tearle ‘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 […]
A Short Analysis of W. B. Yeats’s ‘Leda and the Swan’
A summary of a classic Yeats poem by Dr Oliver Tearle ‘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 […]
A Short Analysis of W. B. Yeats’s ‘Sailing to Byzantium’
A summary of a classic Yeats poem by Dr Oliver Tearle 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, […]