“I have looked upon those brilliant creatures/ and now my heart is sore”. Discuss ways in which Yeats presents loss in ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’.

‘The Wild Swans at Coole, written by W.B.Yeats in 1919, can be noted to be symbolic of a significant point in his life, and therefore can be deemed a turning point, as made reflective in his poetry. Yeats himself was unhappy in nearly every aspect of his life at the time of writing, having faced continuous rejection from long-term focus point of his affection, Maud Gonne, undergoing his autumn years quickly descending upon him through natural ageing and witnessing his beloved birth place of Ireland socially and politically disintegrate around him. An on-going theme throughout his poem, unsurprisingly, is one of a longing, and seeking nature, which is implied continuously through the concept of ‘loss’, in both subtle and loud manners.

The opening stanza is that of a landscape, which is beautiful, as a result of being unharmed by anything but nature, and therefore lacking activity which can be related to human actions or emotions- “the trees are in their autumn beauty/the water mirrors a still sky”- natures maintains a perfect aesthetic, which is happy in its eternal state. A sense of jealousy, personal to Yeats, can be pulled from this; the status of being denied the chance to possess this ‘eternal happiness’ is relative to Yeats, having proposed and endured rejection twice by Gonne. A sense of loss is evident here, regarding the hope that one day his love for Gonne would eventually be returned, to which Yeats can be noted to become somewhat envious of the unproblematic nature of the natural world. This loss regarding his love life is continued in stanza two; “ I have looked upon those brilliant creatures, And now my heart is sore”. The use of past tense here suggests a sense of previous longing, which has now settled