Soaring Swans: Linguistic Inspirations in The Wild Swans at Coole

Words alone are certain good.

—W. B. Yeats

Diverse forms of art are of significance in human culture for how they display collective memories and perform constant stimulations to spectators. Doubtlessly, art creates meanings, whereas language is a system that makes meanings (Halliday, 2005). When the aesthetic evaluation of verbal art is being made, the obscure meanings behind metaphors are often acknowledged, and the language in them is particularly worth investigating. This essay intends to illustrate how poetic language makes meaning, and further, conveys inspirations through the example of a poem by a renowned Irish poet and writer W. B. Yeats, The Wild Swans at Coole.

To the extent of the interpretation of verbal art, it is indispensable to learn about the notion of foregrounding, which implies the ‘contrast of the norms of the text’ (Hasan, 1989). For instance, in Yeats’s The Wild Swans at Coole, the present tense is the norm; thus, other tenses such as past tense and future tense are foregrounded (see table 1). The past tense in stanza B inversing the established tendency of the present tense in stanza A could be a contribution to what literary review suggested that ‘a hint of change’ and ‘a creation of instantaneous nostalgia’ (Hahn, 1961). A picture could be easily perceived where the poet revisits Coole savouring the peaceful scenery and then throws back to the time before ‘the nineteenth autumn’ (B1). Hence, the de-automatisation of the linguistic norm drives to a switch of mood in the poem, from ‘autumn beauty’ (A1) to ‘mount’ (B4), ‘scatter’ (B5) and ‘broken rings’ (B5), symboling the poet’s ‘sorrow and loneliness’ (Constantakis, 2013) and causing ‘an antithetical image of destruction’ (Hahn, 1961).

Table 1            Lexical selection (tenses)

Foregrounding outstands due to its consistency in aspects of stabilities in semantic direction and textual location (Hasan, 1989). Various ‘lexical selections’ and ‘semantic relationships’ lead to the same direction of poetic meaning. Let alone the tenses, other factors like the logical relations and process configuration also point towards the meaning. All of the foregrounded elements (see tables 2 and 3) tend to be concerned with the message brought by stanza E. In stanza D and E, a significant -er role ‘they (the swans)’ (see table 3) appears several times. The Swans whose hearts never ‘grow old’ (D4) are foregrounded subject matters, revealing the lexical metaphor of swans resonating the poet’s youth which has ‘flown away’ (E6).

Table 2            Semantic relationship (logical relations) (selected)

Table 3            Lexical selection (-er roles) (selected)

If acknowledging the poet’s personal experience and historical context,  there could be several approaches in literary critiques. Nevertheless, by reviewing the automatised and de-automatised components might also guide readers to brand-new perceptions from the artwork. The first order of meaning in the swans is the poet’s nostalgia at Coole Park and his loss of youth. A deeper meaning of the poet’s soul and his art is then revealed by foregrounding. His sentiment of old age is ‘death without nothingness’ (Barthes, 1980). The theme of transformation emerged after a logical twist indicated by ‘but’ (E1). Supported by relatively positive wordings like beautiful (E2) and delight (E5), the last four lines (E3-6) could be regarded as a kind of ‘confirmation of the worth of suffering’ co-occurred with art (Stauffer, 1949). By these, readers could understand why Aristotle described the art of poetry as ‘a master of metaphor’ (1941).

Another feature that worth discussing is that antithesis was used in ‘Under the October twilight’ (A3) and ‘Upon the brimming water among the stones’ (A5); swans upon the lake (A, D, E) and swans in the air (B, C); nineteen years then (B) and now (C-E). These elements indicate the contrasts between; the transformation of time and space could be demonstrated (Ullmann, 2013). Especially for ‘but now’ (E1), both words reveal the transition of time. ‘But’ is a hypotactic grammatical cohesion and ‘now’ takes references for ‘before’ (B3) and ‘the first time’ (C4). It could thus be regarded as a large-scaled antithesis. The well-structured poem is divided into segments by tenses, lexical wordings and semantic relationships. It is remarkable how all features are going back to the central theme of the poem. All simultaneously left critiques described it as a ‘remote, detached, classicist’ piece of art by Yeats (Hahn, 1961).

In brief, artistic values are given to these grammatical or lexical patterns due to their functions in the poem, which could be further concluded as ‘meaning-making potential of language’ (Webster, 2015). By evaluating poetry and other forms of verbal art, by unravelling the foregrounded patterns in The Wild Swans at Coole, it is apparent why Halliday defines that language is more than a semiotic system but also a ‘semogenic system’ (2005). It is also why verbal art lives on to communicate individually and socially and inspire generations long after its creation.

Appendix

The Wild Swans at Coole by W. B. Yeats

References

Barthes, R. (1980) ‘Chateaubriand: Life of Rancé’. In New Critical Essays (R. Howard, Trans.), (pp. 41-54). New York: Hill & Wang. (Original work published 1972)

Constantakis S. (2013). ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’. Poetry for Students, (42), (pp. 285-300). Detroit, MI: Gale.

Hahn, M. N. (1961). ‘Yeats’s “The Wild Swans at Coole”: Meaning and Structure’. In College English, 22(6), (pp. 419-421). National Council of Teachers of English.

Halliday, M. A. K. (2005). ‘On matter and meaning: the two realms of human experience’. Linguistics and the Human Sciences, 1(1), (pp.59-82). London: Equinox.

Hasan, R. (1989). Linguitics, language and verbal art (pp. 29-55, 90-106). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Stauffer, D. A. (1949). The Golden Nightingale: Essays on some Principles of Poetry in the Lyrics of William Butler Yeats (p. 66). New York: Macmillan.

Ullmann, C. (2013). ‘Critical Essay on “The Wild Swans at Coole”’. In S. Constantakis (Ed.), Poetry for Students, (42), (pp. 285-300). Detroit, MI: Gale.

Webster, J. J. (2015). ‘Thinking About Language’. In: Understanding Verbal Art (pp. 1-27). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

Yeats, W. B. (2014) ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’. In When You Are Old: Early Poems and Fairy Tales (p. 152). New York: Penguin Books.