But God’s court prevented the execution of the popular sentence. But now he feels he will never experience that flight in its full glory. Such books were described by Joan Rowling in the wizarding world of Harry Potter. Where will the swans, being wild swans, fly away to, and in which lake will they build their homes? The heroes of the tale, in contrast to folk heroes, resemble ordinary people. Eliza lives in harmony with the elements, whether it be a dense forest, the ever-diverse sea or sky. ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’ appears to be an elegiac poem: specifically, a poem mourning the loss of the poet’s own youth and his personal loneliness. But now they drift on the still water, The handsome king who found Eliza in a forest cave is kind and fair. It is categorized as an Aarne-Thompson type 451 ("The Brothers Who Were Turned into Birds"). I saw, before I had well finished, Obviously, the swan that cannot find a life-mate is a symbol for the lonely poet, who sees the “odd” swan as an objective correlative for himself. Yeats had often stayed with Lady Gregory at Coole Park in the summer, and even lived there for some time. As so often with a W. B. Yeats poem, he ends with a question. It plays out the folklore motifs of an evil stepmother, a sorceress, an agreed and mutilated beautiful stepdaughter, children turned by a curse into birds, an enchanted beauty who is in love with a poor girl of the king. An Analysis of The Wild Swans; Andersen-Maguire Edition. The swans’ hearts have not grown old, Yeats tells us: they are possessed of the same youthful passion and vigour (‘conquest’ carries a sexual connotation here, and there is an undercurrent of violence, even sexual violence, running through ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’: fittingly, Yeats would go on to write ‘Leda and the Swan’, a poem about Zeus’ rape of Leda while disguised as a swan). It is difficult to outgrow the love of fairy tales. This page was last edited on 5 August 2020, at 12:21. In her impoverished period of her life, Eliza plays with a sheet in which she pierced a hole, as peasant children do. She can speak no word in her defense, and is sentenced to death by burning at the stake. Mysterious, beautiful; Yeats wrote ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’ in October 1916. According to the law of a fairy tale, Eliza has a magical assistant – a fairy from the air castle of Fata Morgana, which tells how Eliza can save her brothers. This enrages the people, who are on the brink of snatching and destroying the shirts when the swans descend and rescue Elisa. It becomes apparent in this final stanza of ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’ that Yeats isn’t merely using the swans as a symbol for lifelong love (swans mating for life) or a way of reflecting on the passing years since he first visited Coole Park as a young man. The royal children are so bright and pure that even witchcraft is powerless against them. The woodland paths are dry, I appreciate your making a point of Yeats’s particularity in enumerating the total number of swans as fifty-nine and elsewhere in the same essay you relate the problem of his twofold rejection by Maud Gonne and her daughter as well as the well-known fact that swans stay together as couples for life. Thomas Hardy, as a man of late middle age, may have looked at himself in the mirror and lamented the fact that his heart was as youthful (and prone to passionate heartbreak) as when he was a young man, but ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’ acknowledges a more complex romantic attitude towards getting older: that the greatest tragedy is not growing old alone and feeling it keenly, but rather, growing old and losing feeling altogether. [3][4], The Sweethearts; or, The Top and the Ball, Hans Christian Andersen: My Life as a Fairytale, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Wild_Swans&oldid=971326276, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Wild Swans Homework Help Questions. The stepmother wanted to convert the princes into black mute birds, but they became wild swans, and this appearance corresponded to their nature. The trees are in their autumn beauty, Elisa endures painfully blistered hands from nettle stings, and she must also take a vow of silence for the duration of her task, for speaking one word will kill her brothers. Since I first made my count; The plot of the author’s tale, despite the abundance of folklore motifs. The tale “The Wild Swans” was written by 33-year-old Andersen in 1838 and was included in the collection “Fairy Tales Told for Children.” When creating the tale, Andersen relied on the tales of the Brothers Grimm and the Irish legend of a sister and two brothers turned by a stepmother into swans. The old adage about swans, of course, is that they mate for life: hence ‘lover by lover’. But the inner purity of the girl did not allow witchcraft to take place. The basis of this literary tale is a folklore plot. Eliza is even cleaner than the brothers. The brothers carry Elisa to safety in a foreign land where she is out of the reach of her evil stepmother. ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’ is the opening, title poem in W. B. Yeats’s 1917 poetry collection The Wild Swans at Coole. Under the October twilight the water The action takes place in a distant country, in which swallows fly away for the winter. The Queen is unable to convert Eliza into a swan. The brothers discover Elisa's plight and try to speak to the king but fail, thwarted by the rising sun. Not only the stepmother, but also the father does not accept children. The king plucks the topmost flower and places it on Elisa's chest. He seems to be giving up the hope that he can ever be a participant at life’s feast, feeling doomed to be a perpetual observer, one who will always see what he yearns to have, with no hope of ever achieving it. The Wild Swans at Coole, published in 1917, is primarily based on the scenic beauty of Coole Park, an estate about 130km from Dublin that belonged to the poet’s close friend, Lady Gregory and where Yeats was a regular visitor every year. Their hearts have not grown old; Eliza did not even notice the toads. Both the flowers and the book themselves acknowledge this. Back then, he was a young man in his early thirties, and now, but he in his early fifties, in late middle age, unmarried and without children. If he had found a life-mate, he too would be “flying off” with the rest of the swans when the time comes! But as things stand, he knows he will be deprived of that great experience and can only wonder where it is that they will land. The main climax is related to the execution of Eliza as a witch. The king of a distant land loves Eliza for her beauty and kind heart, not caring about her origin. She not only trusts God, knowing that he will not leave her, feed her, but also knows how to be grateful, even props up the branches of the apple tree with chopsticks. Andersen rethinks folklore plots, filling the classical idea of any tale about the victory of good over evil with psychological and philosophical meanings. The Wild Swans (Danish: De vilde svaner) is a literary fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen about a princess who rescues her 11 brothers from a spell cast by an evil queen. And what did I see I had not seen before? He reports the incident to the king as proof of witchcraft. Elisa is now free to speak and tell the truth but faints from exhaustion, so her brothers explain. Having been rejected by two generations of the Gonne family (Gonne … Gonne … going), Yeats wrote this poem, using the autumnal surroundings, and the wild swans found at Coole Park, the Irish home of his friend Lady Gregory, to represent his feelings. Magic separates heroes from ordinary people. Even the streams they paddle in are ‘companionable’, suggesting the companion Yeats himself doesn’t have. “Orpheus, Eurydice and Hermes”, analysis of the poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, “Autumn Day”, analysis of the poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, analysis of the novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “Jonathan Livingston Seagull”, analysis of the novella by Richard Bach, “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”, analysis of the novel by Mark Twain. “The Wild Swans” is one of the most romantic in the broad sense of the word fairy tales of Andersen. It plays out the folklore motifs of an evil stepmother, a sorceress, an agreed and mutilated beautiful stepdaughter, children turned by a curse into birds, an enchanted beauty who is in love with a poor girl of the king. Williams, Christy. The poem’s last stanza bodies forth the poet’s feeling of earthbound exclusion. All suddenly mount Only with his own eyes saw Eliza in the cemetery among the witches sitting on the graves, the king agreed to give her to the people. “The Wild Swans” is one of the most romantic in the broad sense of the word fairy tales of Andersen. This is not even a movie or a computer game. As they do so, the firewood around Elisa's stake miraculously takes root and bursts into flowers. The king of another faraway land happens to come across the mute Elisa and falls in love with her. The Wild Swans (Danish: De vilde svaner) is a literary fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen about a princess who rescues her 11 brothers from a spell cast by an evil queen. The bell-beat of their wings above my head, In the poem’s symbolic argument, Yeats seems to feel that a life-mate would who have been a muse who would would have lifted him and his poetry to new heights.