Yeats

With a tendency to cynically explore the oppositional forces through his interpretation of context and contemporary issues, Yeats inevitably exposes the reader to such themes as time and how it proportionally influences change to happen and also the unfortunate result of unrequited love.   With a heavy linkage to contextual backgrounds, poems such as “Wild Swans at Coole”, “When you are old” and “Easter 1916” imaginatively portray his take on the inevitable outcomes of time and change, and also his unsuccessful love with Maud Gonne. Through relatively common English, Yeats is able to address these complex issues through conversational tone and simple sonnet structures.  
“The Wild Swans at Coole”, represents Yeats’ concern for time and change. It expresses the beauty and youthful experiences that time alters, through his comparison between nature and man. He portrays the timeless swans, “nine-and-fifty” of them. This wording displays an apparent mystical presence nature has, this in contrast to his diction of his “nineteenth autumn”. Whilst reminiscing about the time lost and how it had altered him, the swans ‘suddenly mount’, the word ‘suddenly’ shows the reader that as Yeats was admiring the mystical agelessness of the swans, they suddenly all take flight interrupting him from his trance from looking upon the swan. This has a double endentre, Carpe Diem and the unfortunate realism of time being a constant force, the ever “bell beat” like presence of time ticking away. This suggests to the reader that Yeats, who wrote this during his fifties, is advising us to seize the moment, Yeats sharing his life experiences with the reader. This poem finishes with Yeats describing how he had “trod with a lighter tread”, referring to his youthful days and how he has come to terms   with   his slowly failing body and regret at the time lost and its initial change exerted towards him. His inevitable surrender to the eternal, timelessness of nature.
In “Wild Swans at Coole” a...