On "The Wild Swans at Coole"

The Wild Swans at Coole was published in 1919 - in the aftermath of World War I. Yeats was fifty-four years old. His obsessions with old age and passing time reached new intensities in this book as they became more and more relevant to his immediate experience.

The title poem is the most direct; it sets the sad reflective tone for the rest of the book. The poem takes place on the brink of winter. "The woodland paths are dry" and the seasons, though cyclical, reflect the speakers concern with change. "All's changed", he says, since 19 "autumns" ago. Yeats seems to be specifically referencing the world war, although the change that frightens and saddens him runs deeper than international politics.
The beating wings of the swans "above my head/Trod with a lighter tread" twenty years before. While Yeats is said to have been concerned with aging and death since he was twenty-one, his earlier work is not particularly concerned with personal nostalgia. This book deals directly with the mass mourning of fading memory and Yeats establishes this theme right at the beginning. Even the youthful unchanging swans whose "passion and conquest.../Attend upon them still", will inevitably fly away. The speaker wonders where his most fixed memories will land when they leave him. Yeats leaves it unclear whether this is a rhetorical question reminding us of death's emptiness or an honest hope for greater permanence. The latter seems more likely given Yeats' typical mysticism and the fact that the swans do not die but merely depart - presumably for another lake. But the sinking post-war feeling that absurd nightmares are possible might also reside in the heart of this dark inquiry.

"In Memory of Major Robert Gregory" continues in the same vein; combining the metaphysical thoughts on death concocted by the younger Yeats with the newer and more imminent experiences of nostalgia and fragility. The speaker, in giving a eulogy for a young soldier, is overcome with the sensation that his lifelong friends are dying off. "All, all are in my thoughts to-night being dead." He fumbles for optimism in the depths of this experience. New friends and old friends will not squabble over nonsense and he would be spared the pain of watching them meet only to become enemies.
But these conflicts between his close companions seems to be what he misses the most about them. In recounting their various countenances, he emphasizes the bitter differences they might have had had they met. One is an introverted rationalist another a worldly empiricist. The third dead friend shirked both of their philosophies for physical prowess only to lose his might in his later years.
The speaker solemnly recalls these characters (who were real people according to Wikipedia) to differentiate them from the untimely death ("What made us dream that he could comb grey hair") of Robert Gregory. According to Wikipedia he was an "accomplished artist" and Yeats bemoans this loss of talent: "We dreamed that a great painter had been born" whose work "Wherein the gazing heart doubles her might." A mini-refrain emerges in three stanzas endowing Gregory with "renaissance man" characteristics: "Soldier, scholar, horseman, he,/And all he did done perfectly/As though he had but that one trade alone."
In the third of these stanzas, the speaker unifies his nostalgia for his older dead friends with his eulogy for Gregory. He contrasts the great men he knew who "burn damp faggots" - and thus die slower - with those like Gregory who "...may consume/The entire combustible world in one small room.../Because the work had finished in the flare." He tries to console himself and Gregory's mourners with the thought that his great achievements justified his early death. But as he means to begin listing them in greater detail, he is choked by sadness. The very thought of his death "took all my heart for speech."

Yeats breaks the theme of old age and death for a moment in "Solomon to Sheba" and returns to his earlier thoughts on the frustration and futility of love. The poem describes love as cognitively claustrophobic: "There's not a thing but love can make/The world a narrow pound." King Solomon in one of his biblical songs, addresses a lover that is often presumed to be the Queen of Sheba with whom Solomon exchanged praise and gifts (again, this is from Wikipedia). The lover in the song rejects Solomon's persistent love in effective analogy with Yeats' relationship to Maud Gonne. The image of the horse circling a narrow pound depicts love as a tantalizing passion inescapable to all who participate in it, even if they are educated or wise: "There's not a man or woman/Born under the skies/Dare match in learning with us two." But the equality implied by "us two" and "we have found" suggests that Yeats may be thinking of other loves of more mutual nature than the one between him and Maud Gonne. Perhaps Yeat is examining his own nuanced obstinacy in his pursuit of Maud Gonne when he compares it Solomon's love. Or maybe he is unaware of it and merely presumes that all love, no matter how mutual is plagued by the same paradoxes.

In "Lines Written in Dejection", Yeats attaches his concerns with age more firmly to Ireland. The imaginative and mythical elements in the speakers life have disappeared now that he is fifty years old. These mythic images contain, along with Greek references, strong Celtic symbols. "The round green eyes and the long wavering bodies" mention the Celtic color green and resemble pagan dance rituals. The moon is mentioned twice, an important Celtic symbol of motherhood - the second time the moon is called "mother moon". The "wild witches", which are celebrated as "noble ladies", refer to the labeling of practicing Celtic women as witches. In the European witch trials, women would be accused of witch craft based on their resemblance to pagan women and their ritual behavior. The "holy centaurs of the hills" mix Greek mythology with the beautiful Irish landscape.
This fundamental pre-Catholic Irishness bonds with the curious and creative youth that the speaker remembers in himself. In stark contrast to the adventurous and elusive moon, the sun is "embittered" and - strangely - "timid". The timidity of course does not refer to the sun's power, but to its consistency. The sun is too shy to adopt the mystery of the moon and is irrevocably tied to the mundane.