“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

1. Introduction: sorrow as the essence of the human condition

Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Yeats, “The Stolen Child” (9 – 12)

What are the primary pursuits of humanity? In all likelihood, the tradition would allude to a trinity as the answer – power,¹ fame, and happiness. However, when the achievements of numerous individuals point to the fact that the first two pursuits are successfully attainable, it is perhaps impossible to find a person who could be claimed to be truly happy. The absence of happiness as the quintessential human condition has been emphasized in the works of a good many poets, writers,² philosophers, and other eminent personalities. The ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus³ (525–456 BC) delineates human life with poignancy through the plaintive utterance of his character, Cassandra, toward the end of the play Agamemnon⁴ (5^th century BC) –

Man’s happiest hours

Are pictures drawn in shadow. Then ill fortune comes,

And with two strokes, the wet sponge wipes the drawing out.

(The Oresteian 88, 1325 – 27)⁵

The preeminent English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) points to the core of human reality in his 1820 poem “To a Skylark” in the lines “Our sincerest laughter/With some pain is fraught;/Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought” (88–90). In his immortal “Dover Beach” (1867), the much-acclaimed Victorian poet Matthew Arnold (1822–88) versifies the human world as a place which “Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,/ … nor peace, nor help for pain” (33–34). The illustrious Victorian novelist Thomas Hardy (1940–1928), again, pictures life as “a general drama of pain” in which happiness is only “an occasional episode” in his 1866 novel The Mayor of Casterbridge⁶ (328). On the death of his friend William McCullough, the great statesman and the 16^th president of the United States (from 1861 to 1865), Abraham Lincoln (1809–65) wrote to McCullough’s daughter Fanny, “In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all.”⁷ A large part of the French thinker Jean-Paul Sartre’s (1905–80) mammoth chef-d’oeuvre Being and Nothingness (Ĺêtre et le neant, 1943) is devoted to showing that “Human reality … is by nature an unhappy consciousness with no possibility of surpassing its unhappy state” (114).

But how does the human condition become essentially sad? Why is it that a person can never attain happiness in an unqualified form? In the light of the Sartrean dichotomy of being between the “in-itself” and the “for-itself” (Sartre, Being 18, 95), the present article will seek the answer through the poem “The Wild Swans at Coole” by the celebrated Irish poet William Butler Yeats (1865–1939).

W. B. Yeats is considered “one of the foremost figures of 20^th-century literature” (“William Butler Yeats”). An eminent poet, playwright, writer, and mystic, Yeats was among those great personalities who played a key role in the Irish Literary Revival.⁸ Along with Edward Martyn⁹ and Lady Gregory,¹⁰ he founded the Irish Literary Theatre¹¹ in 1899 and remained its head in the early years. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923 for “his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation” (“The Nobel Prize in Literature 1923”). “The Wild Swans at Coole” is one of his most widely read poems.

2. The visitor’s experience of sorrow

“The Wild Swans at Coole,” which first appeared in June 1917 in the literary magazine, The Little Review, eventually became the titular poem of W. B. Yeats’s 1917 and 1919 collection of poetry, The Wild Swans at Coole. Yeats composed the poem between mid-1916 and early 1917 while staying at the country estate of his friend Isabella Augusta at Coole Park in the western part of Ireland. “This matured, reflective work” (Britannica) recounts in the first-person narrative the feelings of a fictitious visitor to the Coole Park on discerning fifty-nine wild swans on the lake on an autumn evening. The visitor finds the sight of the swans on the lake against the backdrop of the sublime splendor of nature exceedingly delightful. Yeats portrays this pleasant spectacle with images of rare poetic beauty at the beginning of the poem –

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. (1–6)

It goes without saying that the visitor is full of admiration for those “Mysterious, beautiful” creatures (26) and thrilled at their presence.

However, the visitor’s initial thrill proves to be short-lived. It is followed by a sense of melancholy that by and by constitutes the primary tone of the poem. As the visitor looks at the fifty-nine swans paddling “in the cold … stream” or “climb[ing] the air” (16, 17) in pairs with ease, he¹² becomes reminiscent of a similar spectacle that he witnessed nineteen years ago in the same place. He says,

The nineteenth autumn has come upon me

Since I first made my count. (7–8)

In relating the present sight with the past, he feels the wild and youthful spirit of the swans to have remained unchanged, whereas his own enfeebled with time. The birds almost induce in him an illusion of eternity. They become symbolic of the life force (Rajan 115). He senses that, in contrast to them, he has lost much vigor, both physical and mental, during these nineteen years. The feeling overcasts his heart with deep dejection. Mournfully, he utters, “now my heart is sore” (14). He is saddened, moreover, with the thought that the delightful spectacle of the swans, to him almost synonymous with a trans-like state, will cease to exist “when [he is] awake some day” to find the birds have “flown away” (29, 30). Persons other than himself will relish their presence before their eyes at that time (“Delight [other] men’s eyes,” 29), and the present moment will be thrust into his past to become a memory.

The poem’s visitor experiences sorrow in two ways per se. He is saddened, first by his thought about the changes time has fetched in him, that is, on the impermanence of his self, in contrast to the apparent eternity of the swans. Secondly, his sorrow results from reflecting on the probable future in which the swans will be absent from the lake. Now, why is he dejected in this way? Let us investigate the answer, as that will also satiate the query posed in the beginning.

3. The visitor’s twofold anguish

While discussing in Being and Nothingness the way human beings exist in the world, the great French philosopher (arguably the greatest of the 20^th century) and the 1964 Nobel Laureate in Literature, Jean-Paul Sartre (he was equally great as a novelist, playwright, and story-writer) speaks about “being” by dividing it into “in-itself” and “for-itself” (18, 95). By “in-itself,” he intends to point to the matters constituting the world. Matter includes everything sensible, in the way they are in and by themselves as opposed to them experienced as phenomena by consciousness.”For-itself” signifies consciousness or the mind, something that enables one to be aware of the “in-itself” and also of itself as a presence in the world. However, when Sartre claims being to be divided into in-itself and for-itself, he never intends to mean that the two are two different substances or two completely different modes of being “between which there can be no communication” (Manser 47). The two exist “in precisely the same sense” for him (Manser 47). Sartre’s primary intention in making this division is to say that matter and minds coexist in the world.

Sartre says that the world constituted by matter is independent of consciousness. It is entirely in itself, an “inherence … without the least distance” (Sartre, Being 21). It is “self-contained” (Spade 80). Lying equally beyond affirmation and negation, this world is without any cause or explanation. It is never related to anything beyond itself. It “is itself indefinitely” and exhausts itself in being so (Being 20). Hence, it is wholly positive and timeless. However, this world is also inert, beyond activity or passivity. It cannot “refer to itself as self-consciousness does” (Being 21). Naturally, this world has no meaning in itself and cannot express its existence on its own. It is only when the for-itself or consciousness comes into contact with this world that everything in it is felt as existent and meaningful. However, the for-itself is “none other than the nothingness that encounters being” (Daigle 34). It is nothingness because it is empty for being devoid of matter. Consciousness is never in itself. It does not point to an awareness of its own. Rather, it is always posited on something else. That something is the in-itself. Now, while the for-itself, which is essentially nothing, becomes conscious of the world of the in-itself, it fails to reach the world as it is. Instead, “it encounters a phenomenon of its own making” (Daigle 32). The reality constituted by this encounter is the “particularly human kind of reality” (Spade 80). This reality is fraught with negation, change, “lack” (Being 112), and, obviously, temporality. However, it is only the phenomenal reality that human beings can be aware of. This awareness establishes one’s relationship with the world, thus determining the person’s mode of existence. Sartre rightly equates consciousness with human beings.

It is on account of the duality of the world between the in-itself and the for-itself that the visitor’s sadness can be explained. The world of the swans is that of the in-itself. This world is self-contained. It is “what it is” (Being 20), nothing more, nothing less. It is a matter of pure contingency why the lake water is “brimming” (5) or why there are fifty-nine swans and not fifty-eight or sixty, or even why the swans “climb the air” (21) once and “drift on the still water” (25) another time. Neither the state of the lake nor the number or activities of the swans have a cause or explanation. The swans’ world is filled with its constituting elements – “The trees … in their autumn beauty,” dry “woodland paths,” the lake water mirroring “the still sky” (1, 2, 4), and the fifty-nine swans – completely. As such, it is “opaque to itself” (Being 21), unable to express, that is, refer to others, its existence on its own. It begins and ends in itself, so it refers only to itself. It is without the ability to get related to something external, either the visitor or the past or future, or anything else.

Now, if the world of the swans is unable to refer itself or get related to anything beyond itself, how is it that the visitor becomes aware of its existence or recounts it to the reader? The answer is pretty simple. The awareness comes as his consciousness is projected onto the world. As such, what the visitor sees or the reader finds portrayed in the poem cannot be the world of the swans as it is in itself. It is only a phenomenon of that world. Had it not been a phenomenon, the visitor would not immediately feel the urge to relate it to his experience nineteen years ago. He says,

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 (7–12)

Nor could he imagine the lake of Coole in a probable future time without the swans –

… when I awake some day

To find they have flown away. (29–30)

It is again because what he perceives is a phenomenon shaped by his consciousness that he feels to equate his present experience with a trans-like state and fears to “awake some day” to find it faded away with the “lack” of the swans on Coole. Had his perception been utterly identical with the world of the swans as it is, it would have been wholly positive and an end in itself. As such, no probability of the nonexistence (negation) of the swans in the place would ever peep in him. The place with the fifty-nine swans acting according to their will against a background adorned with “autumn beauty” (1) is only what it is and never what the visitor relates it to. In relating the spectacle to the past or the future, the visitor is thinking about it in a way it is not. He is going beyond what is given to what is not, then retreating to the given to make any comparison. Such an oscillation between the given and the non-given is the characteristic of consciousness. However, even if the visitor could remain content with the spectacle of the swans on the lake, that would still be only the phenomenon of the original world of those “brilliant creatures” (13). It is because, first, the world of the swans, as indicated earlier, always exhausts itself in itself. It is inert, in no way related to the visitor. Secondly, the visitor’s consciousness is not what it is for belonging not to itself but to the swans and their surroundings, that is, something other than itself. It is thus negative by nature. When something negative comes into contact with something inert, it is evident that the result cannot be something positive. Something not entirely positive cannot be the in-itself. So it is unlikely that the visitor could ever experience the world of the swans in itself.

However, the visitor’s consciousness makes him aware not only of the phenomenon of the world of the swans but also of himself as an entity lying in sharp contrast with that world. This awareness eventually leads him to utter mournfully, “now my heart is sore” (14). Now, how does the awareness of the phenomenon make him aware of his situation? How, again, does his awareness make him sorrowful? Let us investigate.

As the visitor’s consciousness equates the present phenomenon with the one before nineteen years, he feels the exuberant swans have thwarted the effects of time. For him, “the creatures become the union of the time and the timeless” (Rajan 115). They appear changeless in essence. Their “hearts have not grown old,” and they are “[u]nwearied still,” he says (22, 19). He is led to conclude the present phenomenon to bear the attribute of eternity.

Now, the conclusion he arrives at is, in a sense, correct. Of course, no phenomenon is eternal. However, the in-itself of which a phenomenon is a phenomenon is so. As such, the swans’ world that appears to the visitor as a phenomenon is timeless, though the phenomenon is not. It is timeless because it is wholly positive and self-contained, situated in itself as an identity “indefinitely” (Being 20). So, in feeling the world of the swans to be eternal, the visitor is correct. Now, as he does that by assessing the phenomenon of the world, which he again relates to his memory of nineteen years ago, that is, something beyond what is present, his mode of arriving at the conclusion is wrong. However, as it is pretty impossible for him (as for any human being) to go beyond his consciousness (because it is who he is), he is destined to experience the world of the swans in the way he does. Overall, his conclusion about the swans, because it is arrived at by evaluating their world through the phenomenon shaped by his consciousness, becomes fallacious.

Such a conclusion, again, is not an end in itself. That is impossible, for consciousness is always at play. Consciousness never ceases in taking a phenomenon farther away from that phenomenon, eventually relating the phenomenon to itself. In doing so, it makes the phenomenon a part of the world it feels itself indivisible from. The outcome is the emergence of a sense of lack in an individual. The same happens in the visitor’s case. On having associated the phenomenon of the swans’ world with his experience nineteen years ago and misconceiving it as timeless, his consciousness now focuses on itself to make comparisons and discover incongruity with that phenomenon. He feels that everything has changed in him in the course of nineteen years –

All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,

The first time on this shore,

The bell-beat of their wings above my head. (15–17)

whereas the swans have remained the same,

Their hearts have not grown old

Passion and conquest, wander where they will

Attend upon them still. (22–24)

Through the comparison, the visitor thus relates himself to the swans’ world negatively. The negative relation makes him sense himself as lacking in the eternity of the swans.

Sensing his lack of eternity, he encounters “an emptiness in himself” (O’Brien 3). Now, feeling an urge “to contend with [his] emptiness” (O’Brien 3), he constitutes in his mind the image of a timeless being. The constitution of such mental images is a common human instinct. Sartre presents a fascinating dissertation about this constitution in the second part of his Being and Nothingness, entitled “Being-for-itself,” intending to delineate it as a defense mechanism against one’s sense of existential crisis.¹³ However, having conceived the image of the timeless being, the visitor’s subsequent motive becomes to get transformed into that being. He feels that by becoming it, he will overcome his emptiness. With this feeling, his present being “makes the denial” of itself (Being 110). His present being, to use Sartre’s terminology, is the “existing.” “Existing” signifies the self one believes oneself to be in reality. The timeless being he wishes to transform himself into is the “lacked.” It is the desired self that one craves to attain by transcending the “existing.” And something that his “existing” self requires to be the “lacked” is the “lacking” (Being 110). It is the missing part of the “lacked” that needs to combine with the “existing” to transcend the “existing.”

Now, if the “lacking” the visitor desires is something that enables him to surpass his “existing” self toward a “lacked,” that would be similar to the swans upon “the brimming water among the stones” (5) in themselves, he would become something inert, unable to sense anything, including himself. In other words, he would cease to be conscious. Undoubtedly he would, in that case, become changeless by being fully in himself and ceasing to be related to time anymore. However, that would concomitantly amount to the loss of his consciousness. He would remain nothing more than a matter. Now, his selves, the “existing” as well as the aspired “lacked,” are or devised by his consciousness, which always remains operative. It is his consciousness that ever makes sensing the existence of anything, even itself, possible. Obviously, then the “lacked” he craves of becoming is not similar to the swans on Coole as they are, independent of the phenomenal reality he experiences. Being that would mean, more than anything else, his loss of awareness of himself, for being coincided “with the annihilation of his consciousness” (Being 114). Now, as Sartre says, “consciousness does not surpass itself toward its annihilation; it does not want to lose itself in the in-itself of identity at the limit of its surpassing” (Being 114).

A bit of digression, however, is necessary here. Swans are living beings. They are, evidently, conscious. As such, it is wrong to equate them with inert matter. However, in Yeats’s poem, the creatures become a part of the world that appears to the visitor as changeless. To the visitor, as it seems, the swans take the shape more of objects symbolizing eternity than subjective consciousness, which, like him, are capable of assessing their surroundings but are also subject to time. In that sense, the swans of the poem have been looked upon as matter.

Let us return to the main issue – the “lacked” of the visitor’s desire. Undoubtedly, it is not a state in which he would coincide with himself as the in-itself of the swans. If that is the case, what is this “lacked” then? It is not difficult to find the answer. It is “the impossible synthesis of the for-itself and the in-itself” (Being 114). That means the visitor wishes to acquire the timelessness of the “brilliant creatures” (13) in themselves beyond the phenomenon he perceives but concurrently retain his consciousness. In that case, he would be his foundation “not as nothingness but as being” (Being 114). To state it differently, he would maintain in him the necessary limpidity that being conscious demands but also coincide with himself in the manner of the in-itself of the fifty-nine swans. He is, thus, haunted by the desire of the totality, which is never attainable. This impossible desire leads him in due course to deep dejection, and he plaintively states, “my heart is sore” (14).

However, is the impossible desire of the visitor ever escapable? Sartre answers the question negatively. According to him, humanity is perpetually haunted by this desire. As such, the reality of the race becomes, in essence, as stated in the beginning, “an unhappy consciousness with no possibility of surpassing its unhappy state” (Being 114). As the visitor can never be the “lacked” he craves, his sorrow becomes ineluctable. The visitor’s situation, thus, points to the essence of the human condition, which is nothing more than a “useless passion” (Being 636). The impossibility of ceasing to be conscious necessitates the traits of the in-itself and the for-itself interlaced in the human desire for the ultimate attainment in being. The desire ascertains one’s perpetual sadness.

***

We will now concentrate on the visitor’s sorrow resulting from his depiction of a mental image of Coole Lake devoid of the swans in a probable future. Here, the visitor’s sorrow is implied as he does not directly state that the thought has made his “heart … sore” (14). Concurrently, however, it is obvious. On seeing the “Mysterious, beautiful” creatures drifting “on the still water,” (26, 25) a question emerges in his mind,

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? (27–30)

Evidently, he does not wish a spectacle of Coole without the swans that impart “Delight.” Non-presence of the swans would mean non-presence of delight.

The visitor’s thought about the future is pretty intriguing. At present, he sees some swans on the lake. Swans were also present when he came here nineteen years ago. It is only by relating the present spectacle with the past that he confers on the creatures the attribute of eternity. It would probably not be an exaggeration to claim that the two spectacles become two phases of the same experience for the visitor. He says,

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,

…

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. (13–24)

It seems that in his thought, the swans have remained passionately active on the lake for all these years. In that sense, the swans and the lake become inextricably intertwined. They are two elements of the spectacle that delights him. Now, if what he experiences or had experienced ascertains the presence (positivity) of the swans on Coole, why does the thought of their absence (negativity) in the place ever peek in him? It is not hard to excavate the answer. The thought, obviously, comes from his consciousness. It is consciousness, as we have seen above, that brings negativity to the world.

As stated earlier, consciousness relates the given phenomenon to what the phenomenon is not. We have discussed how the visitor’s consciousness goes beyond the phenomenon of the fifty-nine swans upon “the brimming water among the stones” (5) before his eyes by associating it with his memory nineteen years ago. As such, we realize consciousness to bear a relationship with the past. However, consciousness is equally related to the future. Now, having a future means possessing the trait of transcending the present self toward a probable self, unlike the present one. Non-presence of this facet signifies changelessness or eternity. In that case, something remains what it is forever, ceasing to have any temporal dimensions. Now, changelessness is the characteristic of the in-itself. Being changeless, the in-itself, naturally, remains self-contained and, as such, coincides with itself. However, as we have seen, the for-itself or consciousness can never coincide with itself for being situated on objects other than itself. Nor can it be the same all the time for the same reason. It gets changed by being shifted from one intended object to another. Hence, consciousness is bound to be temporal. It has a present, a past, and a future. It always thinks about the present in connection with a probable future as with the past. “There is not a moment of my consciousness,” Sartre says, “which is not … defined by an internal relation to the future” (Being 151). Such a relation, by attesting to the transcendence of the present, fetches negation of the present.

Like any person, the visitor’s present bears a relationship with a probable future. That future is, of course, not the outcome of the present “explicitly considered” (Being 151). Still, however, “it comes back” spontaneously “over the position” of the present he has adopted “to illuminate” in order to “modify” it (Being 151). In this way, the future defines his present. The present spectacle, which is the intended object of his consciousness, ascertains the presence of the swans on Coole. Thus it delights him. Based on this spectacle, however, his consciousness concocts another in which the birds have “flown away” (30) from the lake. This imagined spectacle is related to an indefinite future. There is, to be sure, no apparent reason why the presence of the swans leads him to a thought about their non-presence. The thought about the future, then, is not the result of the precise consideration of the spectacle he experiences at present. Still, however, it is brought to the present by his consciousness as the negation of the present. In this manner, his present gets modified. Hence, his consciousness goes beyond the present¹⁴ once more, here, to a future not given. As his present gets modified negatively, he gets anguished.

Now, the question is, is the consideration of the present free from a relationship with the future ever possible? The answer is no. It is because being conscious necessitates transcending presence to non-presence, and being conscious is also being oneself as well as one in the world. One is untangled from the future only with death. Yet, death also means nonbeing with the termination of consciousness. Human beings, naturally, can never be truly happy. For, to be human is to be alive and to be alive is to be conscious. Even amid happiness, every human, like the visitor, is haunted by the anguish of “awake[ning] some day” to find happiness “flown away” (29, 30). The visitor’s sorrow, then, once more points to that of humanity at large.

4. Conclusion: is the visitor’s sorrow escapable?

The above exposition clarifies how the delightful spectacle of the swans on the lake of Coole eventually leads the visitor to twofold anguish. Something more, however, needs to be annexed here. If observed closely, it gets distinct that this twofold anguish points to the same thing in two different ways – the visitor’s craving for eternity. In the first place, he yearns for eternity himself. In the second, the longing is for the phenomenon of the swans on the lake. The first yearning is the consequence of consciousness’s relationship with the past, the second with the future. By relating the spectacle of the swans with his memory of nineteen years ago, he endows the present phenomenon with the attribute of eternity. He finds himself “changed” (17) by fetching a comparison with this apparently timeless phenomenon. He wishes to acquire the impossible eternity (where, as stated earlier, the facet of the changelessness of the world of matter is interlaced with the ability of awareness of consciousness) he thinks the swans possess by wrongly evaluating their phenomenal reality. This wish eventually leads him to sorrow. Similarly, his consciousness invites a comparison between the present phenomenon and an imagined one of the future in which the swans are absent from Coole. He feels dejected with his imagination about the future and desiderates the presence of the “[m]ysterious, beautiful” creatures (26) even at that time. That means his sorrow, here, is the outcome of his longing for the changelessness of the present phenomenon.

However, there remains one question: is the visitor’s twofold anguish escapable? The answer is no. It is because his being conscious permits neither his coincidence with himself nor to break free from relating a phenomenon to the past or the future. As such, his longing for eternity, which by nature is impossible, will never cease haunting him and making his heart “sore” (14). Nevertheless, there is some hope. If the visitor begins his evaluation of something (both himself and whatever or whoever he finds around) with an idea of the nature of consciousness, he will not only realize that his experience of that thing is nothing more than a phenomenon of what it is in itself but also that any quest for permanence is futile. Though, in that case, the longing for eternity will not cease lingering in his heart, he will at least find consolation from the thought that his wish is unattainable. As a consequence, he will be able to relish the spectacle of the ebullient swans on Coole “[u]nder the October twilight” (3), that is, the present,¹⁵ more than he does now. The little hope of consolation the visitor is left with, however, is also the only hope of humanity. The simple reason is that, like him, every human is conscious.

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.