আমার অনুমতি ছাড়া এই ব্লগের লেখা কোথাও প্রকাশ করা যাবে না।

“The Wild Swans at Coole” reflects his discouragement as a poet and lover. Alongside with this Yeats treated the immortal power of nature and also depressed about the very matter that how human beings are subject to loss its spirit of youth and have to accept the crucial truth-death. Here the wild swans are the symbol of immortality of nature. The poet became older and was counting for the last moment. In the midst of such mental depression he wrote this poem. Hence the wild swan of Coole is the poet�anguishing of mortality. The speaker’s reverie suggests attitudes about death and eternity and the possibility of immortality.Yeats infuses personal aspects of his private life, such as the restored tower which he seeks to make his home, with great symbolic and universal meaning in a foreshadowing of his later efforts to wed the temporal and transcendent worlds in a unified whole. A Poem About Itself: Symbolism and Prosody in "The Wild Swans at Coole" At first glance, William Butler Yeats's "The Wild Swans at Coole" is a straightforward nature poem in the spirit of the Romantics, praising the stability of animal life in the midst of a chaotic human world. A detailed reading reveals, however, that the poem in fact problematizes that Romantic faith in nature and indeed the idea of poetry in general. The instability of the central symbol, the titular birds, highlights the difficulty in transforming concrete phenomena into symbols for abstract ideas. In this regard, as well as in its unusual meter and rhyme scheme, "The Wild Swans at Coole" is a poem about poetry, rather than about its seeming topics of nature or change. One would not expect such an agenda after only a cursory read of the poem. For the most part, it is narrative and descriptive; only in the final couplet does the speaker veer into abstract musing, and even that inquiry concerns the concrete issue of where the swans will go if they fly away (ll. 29-30). Instead, the speaker presents a straightforward narrative: He sees fifty-nine swans on the water (l. 5). Nineteen years before, he attempted to count the swans, but they had flown away before he could count them (ll. 7-12). In that time, a great deal has changed in the speaker's life (ll. 15-18), but the swans have not; they fly and paddle, not having aged (ll. 19-24). At the moment, though, they simply drift (ll. 25-6); the speaker concludes in wondering where they will go if they fly away (ll. 27-30). This broad outline strongly suggests the reading mentioned before, that the swans are a symbol of natural stability in the midst of human chaos. "All's changed" since nineteen years ago, the speaker says, but the swans have not (l. 15); "their hearts have not grown old" (l. 22). The swans thus represent for the speaker two related but distinct elements: a stable point in an unstable world and a reminder of the speaker's own aging since first he saw the swans. These two elements combine to form a nostalgic tone, as though the swans are the last remaining traces of a simpler bygone age to which the speaker wishes he could return. In this light, the speaker's concluding distress stems from his fear of losing the one constant in a mercurial world. His question - 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? (ll. 27-30) - is a rhetorical one; he does not really care where the swans may be if they are not with him. This reading is highly problematic, however, due to the fundamental paradox involved in using the swans to symbolize stability. If the swans have not changed, then they must fly away; they would be stable in their character but unstable in their location. If they have changed, on the other hand, then they can sit and comfort the speaker; they are stable in location but not in their characteristics. As such, if one accepts the dilemma that the swans either stay the same and fly away or change and stay in one place - and the speaker does not - they are an unsatisfactory symbol of permanence. The poem highlights this paradox in several ways. For one, the speaker describes how nineteen years ago, when he first tried to count the swans, [He] saw, before [he[had well finished, All suddenly mount And scatter wheeling in great broken rings Upon their clamorous wings (ll. 9-12). Now, nearly two decades later, he describes the fowl as unchanged, but he subtly make clear that he has completed his count this time by noting that there are fifty-nine swans (l. 6). In and of itself, this is not damning to the swan symbolism, since it might be mere chance rather than an actual change in the birds that allows the speaker to count them this time, but the difference is nonetheless symptomatic of the larger pattern brought out in the text. In the fourth stanza, the speaker says of the swans that: Unwearied still, lover by lover; They paddle in the cold Companionable streams or climb the air; Their hearts have not grown old. (ll. 19-22). If he is correct, then the swans are unchanged. However, at the moment, his description is by his own admission inaccurate. "now they drift on the still water," he informs the reader (l. 25). Again, the speaker points out a difference between the active, flying birds of two decades before and the tranquil swans he sees now. This inconsistency, as with the other one mentioned, would not in itself be enough to declare the swan symbolism problematic; even the most energetic waterfowl don't fly all the time. In combination, though, these factors call the speaker's description of the swans into question. When the birds have not scattered during the count as they once did, when they drift tranquilly rather than "wheeling in great broken rings/Upon their clamorous wings" (ll. 11-2) as they had nineteen years ago, the burden falls on the speaker to support his claim that "[t]heir hearts have not grown old" (l. 22). The evidence he offers in lines 19-24 - the description of the swans' activities quoted above and a further comment that "Passion or conquest, wander where they will,/Attend upon them still" (ll. 23-4) - contradicts his statement in line 25 that the birds are still, and so the reader must believe that the speaker's description of the birds' unchanged energy is speculation rather than fact. Why would the speaker make an unsubstantiated claim that the swans remain vivacious? Simply put, doing so is the only means the speaker has of resolving the paradox in the swan symbolism. If the swans have flown away, then he is right that they have not changed but they are no comfort to him; likewise, if they stay, then he has his swans but not the stability they should represent to him. His solution is to point out that at the moment the swans stay in one place but that at any time, perhaps as he sleeps, the swans could fly away (ll. 27-30). This hedging highlights the central difficulty in symbolism, that the correspondence between natural phenomena and abstract ideas is rarely neat and one-to-one and so must be manipulated to be cogent. That is the crux of Yeats?s meta-poetic agenda. He builds a poem around one symbol - swans as stability - and then proceeds to call that symbolism into question through careful choice of detail. By meditating on his own symbol, he comments on poetic symbolism in general and illustrates the flaws inherent in it. On a literal level, swans cannot have gone unchanged in nineteen years, and so any poem making such a claim is lying. At the same time, the emotional truth of the image is that for Yeats - or at least for his speaker - swans are a nostalgic reminder of a simpler age. "The Wild Swans at Coole" displays the tightrope a poet must walk between literal and emotional truth. The final question changes meaning in this light; the speaker's thoughts about where another person will see the swans now becomes a question about the reader's reception of poetic symbolism. The poem's meter and rhyme scheme likewise problematizes the act of poetic creation. Each six-line stanza begins with a ballad stanza, alternating an iambic tetrameter line with an iambic trimeter line; the tetrameter lines are unrhymed, while the trimeter lines rhyme. The stanzas conclude with a rhymed couplet, the first line of which is iambic pentameter and the second line of which is in iambic trimeter. The result is an unwieldy stanza, but one with implications for the author's meta-poetic agenda. The alternation of rhymed and unrhymed lines in the opening ballad stanza is not unusual, but when contrasted with the added couplet the unrhymed lines establish a tension that resolves itself into rhyme at the end of each stanza. That resolution, however, is tainted by the asymmetry of the couplet's lines; the tetrameter of the first and third lines in each stanza becomes pentameter in the fifth, resulting in a metrically unbalanced couplet in which one line is nearly twice as long as the next. It is not a tidy metrical scheme, and when paired with the poem's examination of the problems of symbolism the poem's stanza structure becomes an examination of the problems inherent in trying to transfer thoughts about the concrete world into a neat and organized poetic form. Thus, "The Wild Swans at Coole" is a poem rich with problems for poetry. It questions both symbolism and form, two core poetic elements. This critique hides behind a seemingly straightforward narrative of Romantic praise for nature, the very sort of poem Yeats questions. In that regard, "The Wild Swans at Coole" is a poem about itself. twingomatic.blogspot.com. • How does Yeats portray the beauty of autumn? Ans: In the poem The Wild Swans at Coole Yeats presents a sober beauty of the autumnal landscape. The trees are leafless and the paths across the wood are dry. The Cole Lake is full of water to the brim. As there is no wind, its surface is so calm that the clear sky is reflected on it. • How many swans were there in the Shore of Coole Lake? • “I have looked upon those ...tread”. Why does the poet say that “now my heart is sore”? Ans: Nineteen years ago when the poet first visited the lake one day at a twilight of autumn, he saw the swans fly through the air in small circles lover by lover. When they flew away above his head joyously, the whole air was filled with the music of their wings. All this made him happy and content. But now he has grown old in body and soul. He feels bitter and sad at the fact that he now cannot enjoy the sight as he had done in his youth. • “Their hearts have not grown old....” Why does the poet say so? Ans: Standing on the shore of the Coole Lake after a gap of nineteen years the poet feels that unlike himself, the swans have not grown old in body and spirit. Full of youthful vigour they can enjoy paddling through the cold water and winning the hearts of their beloved and mating with them. • Why does the poet call the swans “mysterious creatures”? Ans: As darkness looms large over the surface of the Coole Lake, it seems to the poet that the swans, as if, belong to a different world different from the humans, a world not marked by mutability.