The Wild Swans at Coole and Ireland of Its Time

Introduction The Wild Swans at Coole has two versions: the first edition published by Cuala Press in 1917 and an enlarged and revised second edition published in 1919. The volume we now recognize as The Wild Swans at Coole is the second one, which added seventeen new poems in place of At the Hawk's Well to the original twenty-three. Ronald Schuchard describes the two groups of poems as 'the sun and the moon apart'.1 In the latter, according to him, 'the despairing poet achieve[s] his joyous mask', the gyre shifts from the objective to subjective, and this moment marks the starting point of Yeats 'as a visionary poet'.2 I would like to begin my paper by posing a simple question: Why were the two groups of poems, so different as they were, put together to constitute a single collection in 1919? The Macmillan edition of The Wild Swans at Coole, with the addition of the seventeen new poems, became a larger volume than any other single collection of Yeats's poetry, with only one exception, the posthumous Last Poems edited by the poet's wife. Michael Robantes and the Dancer, which followed The Wild Swans at Coole, had only ten poems, even less than the 1917 edition of The Wild Swans. And, why did the tide continue to be The Wild Swans at Coole? It is curious that in the first edition, the full tide of the book was The Wild Swans at Coole, Other Poems, and a Play in Verse, whereas that of the second one was simply The Wild Swans at Coole. In other words, The Wild Swans at Coole referred to a single poem included in the collection at the time of its first edition, and it was only for the second edition that it came to represent the whole volume. Though the poem itself belonged to the first book, the tide came to have a significance of its own in the 1919 edition. I would like to consider this tide and its implication in the volume, discussing its three components one by one: 'the wild', 'swans', and at Coole'.