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

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.

摘要

本文以叶芝的《库尔的野天鹅》为例，探讨悲伤如何成为人类经验中不可避免的一个特征。在这个作品中，一个虚拟的游客来到库尔公园，表达了在秋夜邂逅湖边五十九只野天鹅的感受。他发现，这些欢快的野天鹅让人感觉轻松愉悦。同时，这一景象又让人很沮丧。鉴于法国思想家萨特的物质和意识理论，本文认为，此游客的悲伤如何呈现为双重的维度。文章同时也揭示，这种悲伤如何指向普遍的人类。文章结尾评估了，逃离此种双重悲伤的可能性。 关键词 意识，库尔，物质，萨特，悲伤，天鹅

KEYWORDS:

• Consciousness
• Coole
• matter
• Sartre
• sorrow
• swans

关键词:

• 意识，库尔，物质，萨特，悲伤，天鹅

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Power is exercised through material wealth, social and/or political position, knowledge, etc.

2. Here, playwrights and writers of fiction.

3. An ancient Greek playwright who is commonly called “the father of tragedy” (“Aeschylus”). It is with his work that the “[a]cademic knowledge of the genre [tragedy] begins” (“Aeschylus”).

4. The opening play of Aeschylus’s The Oresteian Trilogy (5^th century BC). The other two plays of the trilogy are The Libation Bearers and The Eumenides.

5. Only line numbers are mentioned while referring to a poem.

6. In Agamemnon and The Mayor of Casterbridge, especially, the connection between life and sorrow in the quoted lines has been used in the context of the situations of certain characters. However, in each case, rather than limiting the expressions to manifest the personal anguish of the characters concerned, the authors (either through a character or an omniscient narrator) point to the absence of happiness as an attribute of humanity in general.

7. Even here, sorrow has been claimed to be a universal experience. This and the preceding quotations in the article have been used only to emphasize sadness as the essence of the human condition. All these lines/statements have their contextual denotations. However, those denotations are not the concern of this article.

8. The Irish Literary Revival (also known as the Celtic Twilight) signifies the blossoming of the literary aptitude of Ireland in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. The Revival incorporates great works of art, music, poetry, plays, etc.

9. Edward Martyn (1859–1923) was an Irish playwright contemporary to Yeats. He was another founding figure of the Irish Literary Theatre. He was also a friend of Yeats.

10. Lady Gregory or Isabella Augusta (1852–1932), with whom Yeats got introduced in 1896 through Edward Martyn, was an Irish playwright and theater manager. She was another co-founder of the Irish Literary Theater.

11. Founded in 1899 in Dublin, Ireland, by W. B. Yeats, Edward Martyn, and Lady Gregory, the Irish Literary Theatre proposed to provide the platform for performances of plays by Irish playwrights. The Irish Literary Theatre ran until 1901. After that, it folded due to wanting funds.

12. Assumed by the poet’s gender.

13. By existential crisis, I mean the anguish that one experiences on sensing some sort of lack in one’s being. One might, for example, feel the lack of necessity of being the person one knows oneself to be. One might even feel the lack of essence in one’s mundane activities. In any case, one gets anguished and usually attempts to escape the anguish. Here, the crisis (anguish) of the visitor, as we know, acquires the shape of his sense of inner emptiness as he feels himself lacking in the swans’ eternity. To escape the crisis, he imagines a timeless being in his being.

14. Here, the present points primarily to the current time, that is, the time the visitor is present in Coole. However, it also denotes the presence of the swans on the lake at that time.

15. Once again signifies both the present time and the presence (of something) in the present.