"The Wild Swans at Coole" is a lyric poem by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats (1865âÂÂ1939). Written between 1916 and early 1917, the poem was first published in the June 1917 issue of the Little Review, and became the title poem in the Yeats's 1917 and 1919 collections The Wild Swans at Coole.
It was written during a period when Yeats was staying with his friend Lady Gregory at her home at Coole Park, and the assembled collection was dedicated to her son, Major Robert Gregory (1881âÂÂ1918), a British airman killed during a friendly fire incident in the First World War. Literary scholar Daniel Tobin writes that Yeats was melancholy and unhappy, reflecting on his advancing age, romantic rejections by both Maud Gonne and her daughter Iseult Gonne, and the ongoing Irish rebellion against the British. Tobin reflects that the poem is about the poet's search for a lasting beauty in a changing world where beauty is mortal and temporary.
The poem has a very regular stanza form: five six-line stanzas, each written in a roughly iambic meter, with the first and third lines in tetrameter, the second, fourth, and sixth lines in trimeter, and the fifth line in pentameter, so that the pattern of stressed syllables in each stanza is 434353. The rhyme scheme in each stanza is ABCBDD.
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In his LP Branduardi canta Yeats (1986), Angelo Branduardi sings an Italian version (I Cigni di Coole) of this poem.
In the popular medical drama, House, M.D., [December 21st, 2004] episode 6 season 1, The patient Lucy is being read this poem. Assuming it is a reference to Maud Gonne whose birthday is of the same day.