The Wild Swans at Coole. William Butler Yeats

illiam Butler

      The Wild Swans at Coole

      PREFACE

      This book is, in part, a reprint of The Wild Swans at Coole, printed a year ago on my sister's hand-press at Dundrum, Co. Dublin. I have not, however, reprinted a play which may be a part of a book of new plays suggested by the dance plays of Japan, and I have added a number of new poems. Michael Robartes and John Aherne, whose names occur in one or other of these, are characters in some stories I wrote years ago, who have once again become a part of the phantasmagoria through which I can alone express my convictions about the world. I have the fancy that I read the name John Aherne among those of men prosecuted for making a disturbance at the first production of "The Play Boy," which may account for his animosity to myself.

W. B. Y.

      Ballylee, Co. Galway,

      September 1918.

      THE WILD SWANS AT COOLE

      The trees are in their autumn beauty,

      The woodland paths are dry,

      Under the October twilight the water

      Mirrors a still sky;

      Upon the brimming water among the stones

      Are nine and fifty swans.

      The nineteenth Autumn has come upon me

      Since I first made my count;

      I saw, before I had well finished,

      All suddenly mount

      And scatter wheeling in great broken rings

      Upon their clamorous wings.

      I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,

      And now my heart is sore.

      All's changed since I, hearing at twilight,

      The first time on this shore,

      The bell-beat of their wings above my head,

      Trod with a lighter tread.

      Unwearied still, lover by lover,

      They paddle in the cold,

      Companionable streams or climb the air;

      Their hearts have not grown old;

      Passion or conquest, wander where they will,

      Attend upon them still.

      But now they drift on the still water

      Mysterious, beautiful;

      Among what rushes will they build,

      By what lake's edge or pool

      Delight men's eyes, when I awake some day

      To find they have flown away?

      IN MEMORY OF

      MAJOR ROBERT GREGORY

1

      Now that we're almost settled in our house

      I'll name the friends that cannot sup with us

      Beside a fire of turf in the ancient tower,

      And having talked to some late hour

      Climb up the narrow winding stair to bed:

      Discoverers of forgotten truth

      Or mere companions of my youth,

      All, all are in my thoughts to-night, being dead.

2

      Always we'd have the new friend meet the old,

      And we are hurt if either friend seem cold,

      And there is salt to lengthen out the smart

      In the affections of our heart,

      And quarrels are blown up upon that head;

      But not a friend that I would bring

      This night can set us quarrelling,

      For all that come into my mind are dead.

3

      Lionel Johnson comes the first to mind,

      That loved his learning better than mankind,

      Though courteous to the worst; much falling he

      Brooded upon sanctity

      Till all his Greek and Latin learning seemed

      A long blast upon the horn that brought

      A little nearer to his thought

      A measureless consummation that he dreamed.

4

      And that enquiring man John Synge comes next,

      That dying chose the living world for text

      And never could have rested in the tomb

      But that, long travelling, he had come

      Towards nightfall upon certain set apart

      In a most desolate stony place,

      Towards nightfall upon a race

      Passionate and simple like his heart.

5

      And then I think of old George Pollexfen,

      In muscular youth well known to Mayo men

      For horsemanship at meets or at race-courses,

      That could have shown how purebred horses

      And solid men, for all their passion, live

      But as the outrageous stars incline

      By opposition, square and trine;

      Having grown sluggish and contemplative.

6

      They were my close companions many a year,

      A portion of my mind and life, as it were,

      And now their breathless faces seem to look

      Out of some old picture-book;

      I am accustomed to their lack of breath,

      But not that my dear friend's dear son,

      Our Sidney and our perfect man,

      Could share in that discourtesy of death.

7

      For all things the delighted eye now sees

      Were loved by him; the old storm-broken trees

      That cast their shadows upon road and bridge;

      The tower set on the stream's edge;

      The ford where drinking cattle make a stir

      Nightly, and startled by that sound

      The water-hen must change her ground;

      He might have been your heartiest welcomer.

8

      When with the Galway foxhounds he would ride

      From Castle Taylor to the Roxborough side

      Or Esserkelly plain, few kept his pace;

      At Mooneen he had leaped a place

      So perilous that half the astonished meet

      Had shut their eyes, and where was it

      He rode a race without a bit?

      And yet his mind outran the horses' feet.

9

      We dreamed that a great painter had been born

      To cold Clare rock and Galway rock and thorn,

      To that stern colour and that delicate line

      That are our secret discipline

      Wherein the gazing heart doubles her might.

      Soldier, scholar, horseman, he,

      And yet he had the intensity

      To