Wild Swans at Coole (Version 3)

At the height of his powers, Yeats gave us this collection in 1917, a meditation on time's passage and the ache of beauty. The title poem finds the poet at Coole Park, watching seventeen swans and confronting what it means to grow old while the world transforms around him. These poems carry the weight of Yeats's Irish inheritance, his lifelong dialogue with the ancient world, and his insistence that art can hold back the tide. Whether invoking the mystic, the political, or the intimate, Yeats writes with a hardness that still startles. This is poetry for anyone who has stood watching something beautiful and known it would not last.