The poem opens with a description of Yeats' present experience of Coole Park.
The poet presents the landscape and the swimming of fifty-nine swans in an astonishing economy of words.
The poet refers to his past experience and makes a contrast between him and the birds.
It is nineteen years since he first saw and counted these fifty-nine swans.
Nineteen years ago when he first heard the rhythmic noise of swans' wings, he was more romantic, almost like the birds.
During these nineteen years everything about him has been changed.
Now, looking at these lively birds he becomes sad because he feels that he has lost the romantic exuberance that the birds have.
Yeats presents his personal experiences of past and present in this poem.
Therefore, the poem is subjective in nature.
Yeats fell in great romantic love with Maud Gonne in 1889 and he kept on wooing her for long many years and Miss Gonne had been refusing him for all these years.
In 1897 when he first visited the Coole Park, he still had some hope.
But in 1903 when Maud Gonne married MacBride, Yeats had a bitter breakdown.
During these years he fell in love with Olivia Shakespeare who also left him because she came to know that he was still in love with Miss Gonne.
Between 1897 and 1916, he developed a kind of infatuation for Iseult Gonne, the adopted daughter of Maud Gonne.
But he was in doubt whether Iseult would accept him if he proposed her for mirage.
However, in the final stanza he crosses the boundary of subjectivity and generalizes the truth about mortality, with special reference to mutability.
Here the symbolic dimension of the swans changes.
In the earlier stanzas, the swans symbolize the poet's romantic exuberance but in the final stanza they have been used to symbolize the continuity of youthful joy generation after generation.
So, the poem begins subjectively but ends with universal significance.
It is needless to mention that a sad tone runs throughout the first four stanzas and it becomes graver in the last stanza.
The poem consists of five regular stanzas.
Each stanza consists of six iambic lines rhyming as abcbdd.
Each couple of lines has a pattern of four meters and three meters.
The harmony between the movement of the birds and the sound pattern of the stanzas adds extra charm to the lyricism of the poem.
The lyricism of the poem has also been achieved by simple and lucid words.