Dry paths (symbol)
The image of the dry paths appears in the first stanza. It is contrasted with the abundant imagery of the overflowing lake and the fifty-nine swans. Through this, two worlds are created from the beginning of the poem: the world of the lake, symbolizing life and abundance, and the world the poet inhabits, dominated by dryness and by autumn. For the poet, the dry paths symbolize the passage through time and the fact that in his universe, everything changes and dies, while in the swans' universe, everything seems to remain unchanged, and life is eternal and always full of mystery and beauty.
Swans (symbols)
The swans are the poem's most prominent symbols. They remain unchanged despite everything that has changed in the speaker's life. The swans also symbolize beauty, grace and energy, and the poem endows them with a mythical status, portraying them as divine creatures unmoved by time and immune to pain and weariness.
In poetry and literature, birds often represent freedom and flight away from the confines of human life. These swans definitely offer an escape from the speaker's fears about getting old. They may represent Yeats’ love Maud Gonne, who rejected him. Yeats was able to let go of this love as he gets older, but he continued to treasure her memory, as the speaker treasures the sight of the swans on the water, though it brings a pang to his heart. Yeats often associated swans with the mystical world; as creatures that can float on water and fly, they are in communion with life’s opposing forces, reaching divine status in their peaceful acceptance of life’s contradictions.
Swans represent creativity, beauty, and life. In Greek mythology, swans were used to symbolize Zeus and therefore the rise of the Greek civilization and Western knowledge, which idealized perfection.
Twilight (symbol)
Twilight is the hour when daylight shifts into nighttime, and in "The Wild Swans at Coole," twilight serves as a symbol of the narrator's descent into his twilight years. Yeats was 51 when he wrote this poem, and still unmarried, so his mortality and the passage of time was a pressing concern to him. Like the dry paths and the autumn season, twilight symbolizes his knowledge that he is no longer in the golden years of his youth—though he is still not in the darkness of death quite yet.
Stillness (motif)
Stillness is a motif that appears throughout in the poem and exists both internally and outside the narrator's mind. The physical stillness of the woods and sky are contrasted with the swans, which are the only elements that appear to be in motion while everything around them is frozen and immobile.
The speaker, too, is a fixed point in the poem, coming to an internal stillness, learning to make peace with the stillness of his surroundings, while also still appreciating the wild beauty of the swans. The whole poem itself has no actual action in it; memory provides the only semblance of physical motion within its stanzas.
Stillness may represent both that the narrator's world is slowing down, and that he is coming to peace with his place in the autumn of his life.
Acceptance (motif)
The speaker recognizes that he is no longer the young man he used to be and that he is in the twilight of his life. He accepts this realization, acknowledging that the swans will continue to bring beauty into the worlds of others after he is gone.
He describes the swans as mysterious and beautiful, but he might as well be describing life, throwing his hands up and surrendering to the vast, mysterious beauty of existence, knowing that he will never be able to control the world he lives in, but appreciating and accepting it all the while.
When he speaks about the swans in the end and how they will someday provide entertainment for other people, he speaks about that with certainty and there is no doubt that he has accepted the fact that there will come a day when he will not be able to see them anymore. From start to finish, the poem tells a story of acceptance.
Nature (motif)
Nature in “The Wild Swans at Coole” represents change, and it also represents a peaceful, graceful understanding of change. Nature on the whole, is depicted as beautiful and sad, reflecting Yeats’ melancholic mood, while also providing a passage out of it. He sets the poem in an autumnal landscape, which reflects his aging body and spirit, but he sees the swans, also part of nature, as symbols of youth that lives on as part of nature’s creative, constant cycles of growth.
Therefore nature possesses a kind of duality that Yeats is coming to terms with in this poem: it is constantly growing and also constantly dying, and it is totally at peace with this, performing this contradictory feat with grace and ease.
Occultism (allegory)
Occultism is the mystical study of secrets of the universe and interconnected forces that bind everything together. Mastering it supposedly endows humans with divine, magical powers. “The Wild Swans at Coole” contains occult themes and may be an allegory for Yeats’ pursuit of an occult understanding. His use of reflections and symbols—the sky reflects the lake, and the swans fly in broken circles—express occult and mystical theories that propose that all of life is a series of interlocked circles and cycles from life to death.
Trees are also common occult symbols, with roots in the earth and leaves in the sky, forming bridges between the human world and the divine one like occultism tries to do. By using occult archetypes, Yeats’ poem—which on the surface is a meditation on aging—provides an occult allegory for a higher understanding of the cycle of life. The ultimate goal of occultism would be to escape this cycle by gaining a higher knowledge of it. The poem suggests that there are some things that do last forever, and some parts of the soul that are connected to a far vaster oversoul that is able to transcend mortality and human suffering.
