Swans at Coole Park
In one of his finest poems, W. B. Yeats wrote of autumn, when the wild swans, Bewick's and Whoopers with their yellow and black bills, migrate to the British Isles from Scandinavia, Finland and northern Russia:
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?
Much has been written about the merits and meaning of this great poem and such material can be readily found elsewhere. This note is mainly concerned with the context provided by the swans. The poem gives a powerful fairly objective description of their behaviour - you can almost hear them rising from the water in the second stanza. This is coupled with Yeats's own reactions - mysterious, beautiful, and a hint 'All's changed' of troubles and changes in his own situation over the years, which he compares with the long and faithful pair bond of the swans. He ends with a different thought - where do they go? This is the question of a naturalist as much as a poet and, for those who have seen them nesting on the edge of a Finnish lake, an irresistible conclusion. The poet counts them, as he has apparently done at times over the previous 18 years - an action which strengthens the work by adding precision and suggests (probably wrongly) that the poet is a man who keeps other bird records. Since he did his count, Coole Park has attained international conservation status for its wintering wildfowl and the wild swans has been peaking at around 400.
Most bird behaviour is instinctive, without a forward plan. A nest is built with no thought of eggs being laid in it. Eggs are laid with no thought of young. Birds may learn from the past, but do not seem to have any consciousness of future. And yet, as Yeats noted, they undertake great annual migrations. How they do it has not yet been fully worked out, but it must involve some innate ability. Many young Cuckoos find their own way to Africa, as do the young of some other species. Sometimes a young bird gets lost, finishing up as a rarity in an alien clime, a birdwatcher's prize. This is by definition a rare event - as R. S. Thomas, who was himself a birdwatcher, remarked in his poem Seawatching 'Ah but a rare bird / is rare'. Thomas was using this as an image of his search for contact with God.
The Coole Park website illustrates a Red Squirrel. Many poets have written well about squirrels and other birds and animals, usually in some wider context rather than that of the world of the creatures themselves. In an urbane and witty poem, The Grey Squirrel, Humbert Wolf packed as much in 16 short lines as many others have in much longer works:
Like a little grey
coffee-pot
sits the squirrel.
He is not
all he should be,
kills by dozens
trees, and eats
his red-brown cousins.
The keeper on the
other hand,
who shot him, is
a Christian and
loves his enemies,
which shows
the squirrel was not
one of those.
Much rarer is an attempt to get into the head of the creature and write of the mysteries of its world. D. H. Lawrence's poem Snake gives one of the finest and most objective descriptions of what the creature looked like to him, but went no further. An anonymous Celtic poem quoted by David Adam, in Open Door, gives a feel of something different, the sense of a natural world shared rather than observed:
Be gentle when you touch bread.
Let it not lie, uncared for,
Unwanted.
So often bread is taken for granted.
There is such beauty in bread -
Beauty of sun and soil,
Beauty of patient toil.
Wind and rain have caressed it,
Christ often blessed it.
Be gentle when you touch bread.
This is not especially a Christian poem. Without the penultimate line, it finds echoes in much wider and traditions of both east and west, as does a saying attributed to St Columbianus (Columba): 'He who tramples on the earth tramples on himself'. Columbianus is the scientific name of one of the wild swan species visiting Coole Park.
Page(s) 35-37
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The