Yeats’s Swans
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty swans.
– WB Yeats
On the seldom-visited, west-looking, wave-etched headland,
the ancient fortress buried in high grass has softened
into barrow mounds grazed by sheep,
its tumbled stones claimed by farmers across generations
to enclose their pastures in drystone walls
stitched like rough sutures across a quilt of green fields,
and the government has built a new lighthouse
beside the old castle
from which the beacon signals
like a jewel refracting sunlight from the mind’s tower
and the sea reflects back
its prismatic imagination of the future.
So time is not a god but a golden mirror,
an aspect of self-consciousness,
the frenzy of swans settling to water.
And when they insinuate their snakelike necks
below the surface what
can they perceive of the afterlife?
And when a fish breaches suddenly, leaping free
of its element, crossing over
to the suffocating, planar emptiness of our world,
is this not what visionaries see?
Is this heaven, then,
this voluptuous, sun-stricken, gravity-ridden realm?
And afterward, to fall back
from such a height,
to surrender celestial fire for common salt.
The birds on the water resemble sleepwalkers now
and our words clatter like stones
on a shore slipping from sunlight into shadow.
Soon the wild swans are far behind, and Sligo’s silver loom
of waves is far behind us,
and the cottage-clotted hackles of the gaeltacht
as the road which has risen from fens to treeless moors
vanishes into the ambiguous light of eternity
beneath the ash-draggled slopes of Mount Errigal.
Poetry Ireland Review Issue 116:
A WB Yeats Special Issue
This essential Yeats anniversary publication is edited by Vona Groarke and includes responses to Yeats’s legacy and readings of his poems from public figures as diverse as Bill Whelan, Neil Jordan, Colm Tóibín, Frank McGuinness, Mary Costello and John Banville, along with new poems responding to Yeats’s work by Irish and international poets such as Margaret Atwood, Sharon Olds, Philip Schultz, Sinéad Morrissey and Harry Clifton. The issue also includes Yeats’s poetry collections, reviewed by leading poets as if just published. Now also available in hardback.
"superb special edition" John Boland, Irish Independent
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