While I liked a few of the poems in this selection, most were just humdrum for me. I didn't hate them or find them impossible to understand (which is far too often the case with poetry for me) but they didn't speak to me.

These are the poems I liked best in the collection: "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death", "The Living Beauty", "The Hawk", "The Cat and the Moon" and "Another Song of a Fool" ( )

Eh, I find that both this audiobook & the poems therein leave me lukewarm. I may try other Yeats poems but not in audio form... ( )

Thanks to my daughter, I was fortunate to encounter the poems of W.B. Yeats upon my recent visit to Dublin. Having visited the Yeats exhibition at the National Library of Ireland, I was intrigued by this complex man who wrote so deftly about issues, such as aging and death, as well as love, and the beauty of nature. I especially loved the poem to which this collection was named, ‘The Wild Swans of Coole,’ a place of extraordinary beauty in which Yeats contemplates how the lovely swans, unlike himself who is weary, still experience life passionately and freely. In witnessing the swans paddling in the cold, or the lovely moment of the ‘bell-beat of their wings’ above his head, Yeats also realizes how fleeting this moment of beauty can be, as he considers how when he awakens some day, the swans may have flown away.
It seems to me that Yeats often wrote about his relationships with women, and since he was promiscuous throughout his life, he was awarded with ample writing resources. Throughout his life, Yeats possessed an unrequited love for a well-spirited woman named Maude Gonne with whom he maintained a close friendship throughout his life. In this anthology, Yeats writes a very short poem, entitled ‘Memory,’ in which he compares the love of his life to a mountain hare, for where the hare lies, its form cannot be held in the mountain grass. To me, Yeats speaks of the elusiveness of this idyllic relationship. Written with only a few lines, this poem to me is almost perfection, as a haiku, which succinctly speaks profoundly with minimal words. ( )

While I liked a few of the poems in this selection, most were just humdrum for me. I didn't hate them or find them impossible to understand (which is far too often the case with poetry for me) but they didn't speak to me.

These are the poems I liked best in the collection: "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death", "The Living Beauty", "The Hawk", "The Cat and the Moon" and "Another Song of a Fool" ( )

Eh, I find that both this audiobook & the poems therein leave me lukewarm. I may try other Yeats poems but not in audio form... ( )