"The Wild Swans at Coole"
...y conventional statement directly addresses the poet's feeling: "And now my heart is sore." This is not an unbeautiful line, and it is a significant event in the poem; but the source of emotional impact lies elsewhere - in suggestion, elided narrative, and especially displacement: the speaker reveals himself through implied contrast with the landscape around him, and particularly with the swans that are the poem's subject and occasion. The poem's manner is casually eloquent, poised between high and low art. The stanza invented by Yeats begins as a ballad, with alternating lines of tetrameter and trimeter. He adds a final couplet, any epigramatic force of which is muted by the lines' differing lengths (pentameter and trimeter), and also by enjambment between quatrain and couplet in all but the first and third stanzas. The stanza rhymes x a x a b b; twice ("stones"/"swans"; "beautiful"/"pool") the rhymes are slanted. The casual feel of the poem is heightened by an extraordinarily fluid prosody: by far, the majority of the lines contain metrical variations. Initial truncatio...