Saturday Rave: The Wild Swans at Coole by W B Yeats.

In half the world it's Autumn, and here's a scent of it.

The Wild Swans at Coole by W B Yeats is the title poem of a collection Yeats wrote during the First Word War. It was an unhappy time for him. Two relationships had failed, and he was feeling old and haunted by the waste of war.




'We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric,' Yeats said, 'but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.'

And that is what he did.

This is the end of his poem about the wild swans.

But now they drift on the 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 that they have flown away?

Word To Use Today: wild. This word has hardly changed in centuries. The Old English form was wilde.