The Wild Swans at Coole (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
The Poem
“The Wild Swans at Coole” consists of five six-line stanzas rhymed abcbdd. The meter is iambic, but loosened to accommodate the irregular cadences of speech. Odd-numbered lines have four stressed syllables, even-numbered lines three. The stanza, then, is a modified ballad stanza plus a rhymed couplet. Although William Butler Yeats uses six-line stanzas in many other poems, nowhere else does he employ exactly this stanza, which is stately but not stiff, well-suited to the poem’s reflective tone and melancholy mood.
It is a lyric poem both because of...
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