"The Wild Swans at Coole," by William Butler Yeats

The trees are in their autumn beauty,

The woodland paths are dry,

Under the October twilight the water

Mirrors a still sky;

Upon the brimming water among the stones

Are nine-and-fifty swans.

The nineteenth autumn has come upon me

Since I first made my count;

I saw, before I had well finished,

All suddenly mount

And scatter wheeling in great broken rings

Upon their clamorous wings.

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,

And now my heart is sore.

All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,

The first time on this shore,

The bell-beat of their wings above my head,

Trod with a lighter tread.

Unwearied still, lover by lover,

They paddle in the cold

Companionable streams or climb the air;

Their hearts have not grown old:

Passion or conquest, wander where they will,

attend upon them still.

But now they drift on the still water,

Mysterious, beautiful;

Among what rushes will they build,

By what lake’s edge or pool

Delight men’s eyes when I awake some day

To find they have flown away?

The Irish poet and playwright William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) was among the most notable and best loved English language poets of the 20th Century. Although he is often accepted among the modernists as one of their own, his poetry tends to be more traditional, with its roots in the late Victorian poetry of the 19th Century. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.