The Wild Swans at Coole
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
The Wild Swans at Coole
London, Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1919
The title poem of Yeats’s collection The Wild Swans at Coole celebrates his years of friendship with Lady Gregory but also elegiacally registers his own sense of aging and readiness to distance himself from her—a readiness emphasized by his purchase of a home of his own at Ballylee. Artist and poet Thomas Sturge Moore designed the iconic covers of many of Yeats’s later collections of poetry. This spare, elegant design features one bird silhouetted against the sphere of sun or moon and another taking flight from the surface of water, highlighting the volume’s concern with the relationship between the actual and the transcendent.
: Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
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