Wild Swans at Coole (Version 2)

Here is a collection written in the shadow of everything Yeats loved collapsing into history. The Easter Rising, the Great War, advancing age, and a love that never quite left him - all of it moves through these poems like water through a cracked cup. The title poem remains one of the most ache-inducing in the English language: the speaker returns to a lake and finds seventeen swans, still wild, still eternal, while he has grown old waiting for something that never arrived. There is no cheap consolation here. Yeats offers instead the cold comfort of beauty observed clearly, of symbols that do their work without explanation - the hare, the cat, the moon, the ancient figures who speak from beyond the veil. These are poems from a man who refused easy faith but could not stop searching for what lies beneath the surface of things. They are Irish, yes, but they belong to anyone who has felt time's teeth.