“My Heart is sore”: Rethinking the Human Condition Through Yeats’s “The Wild Swans at Coole”

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article probes into W. B. Yeats’s 1917 poem “The Wild Swans at Coole” to illumine how sorrow becomes an ineluctable trait of human experience. In the poem, a fictitious visitor to Coole Park articulates his feelings on descrying fifty-nine wild swans on the lake on an autumn evening. He finds the spectacle of the effervescent creatures amidst the beauty of nature pretty delightful. Concurrently, however, the same spectacle makes him dejected. Considering the French thinker Jean-Paul Sartre’s theory of matter and consciousness, this article will convey how, in essence, the visitor’s anguish is twofold, and how it is the consequence of his act of relating the spectacle of the swans to external factors. The article will also reveal how the visitor’s sorrow points to that of humanity in general. The conclusion will be drawn by assessing whether an escape from the twofold anguish of the visitor is possible.