Writing Assignments

The impact of one author or literary work upon another may be unconscious or deliberate. The following two poems, written some seventy years apart by an Irishman and an American, strongly suggest that the former poem inspired or influenced the latter. Read each poem carefully. Then, in a well-organized essay, discuss how the two poems provoke a strikingly different response through similar scenes. In your essay, you may wish to consider such elements as diction, theme, choice of detail, figurative language, and tone.

The Wild Swans at Coole

The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
5 Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine and fifty swans.

The nineteenth Autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
10 All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
15 All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.

Unwearied still, lover by lover,
20 They paddle in the cold,
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.

25 But now they drift on the still water
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake’s edge or pool
Delight men’s eyes, when I awake some day
30 To find they have flown away?

— William Butler Yeats (1916, 1919)

The Great Scarf of Birds

Playing golf on Cape Ann in October,
I saw something to remember.
Ripe apples were caught like red fish in the nets
of their branches. The maples
5 were colored like apples
part orange and red, part green.
The elms, already transparent trees,
seemed swaying vases full of sky. The sky
was dramatic with great straggling V’s
10 of geese streaming south, mare’s-tails above
them.
Their trumpeting made us look up and around.
The course sloped into salt marshes,
and this seemed to cause the abundance of birds.
As if out of the Bible
15 or science fiction,
a cloud appeared, a cloud of dots
like iron filings which a magnet
underneath the paper undulates.
It dartingly darkened in spots,
20 paled, pulsed, compressed, distended, yet
held an identify firm: a flock
of starlings, as much one thing as a rock.
One will move above the trees
the liquid and hesitant drift.
25 Come nearer, it became less marvelous,
more legible, and merely huge.
“I never saw so many birds!” my friend exclaimed.
We returned our eyes to the game.
Later, as Lot’s wife must have done,
30 in a pause of walking, not thinking
of calling down a consequence
I lazily looked around.

The rise of the fairway above us was tinted,
so evenly tinted I might not have noticed
35 but that at the rim of the delicate shadow
the starlings were thicker and outlined the flock
as an ink stain in drying pronounces it edges.
The gradual rise of green was vastly covered:
I had thought nothing in nature could be so broad but grass.
40 And as
I watched, one bird,
prompted by accident or will to lead,
ceased resting; and, in lifting in a casual billow,
the flock ascended as a lady’s scarf,
45 transparent, of gray, might be twitched
by one corner, drawn upward and then,
decided against, negligently tossed toward a chair.
the southward cloud withdrew into the air.
Long had it been since my heart
50 had been lifted as it was by the lifting of that
great scarf.

— John Updike (1989)