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Each remembered detail of the swans' flight etches itself upon the poet's sensibility with exaggerated force. These details do not simply complement his train of thought-they control and direct it. Through this seizing of his imagination in a whirl of colour and sound, he is led to a pitch of self-awareness in which he measures the progress of his own life beside that of the swans'. As they drift in a timeless moment on the still water, or wheel in an eternal gesture above his head, they seem to partake of an immortal life of youth and love which he is denied. The poet finds himself suddenly recalled to his own mortality and death. A feeling of deep illimitable despair-in-quietude washes over the poem's last stanzas.

 I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All's changed since 1, 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,
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.

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
To find they have flown away?

It may be seen from this poem that Yeats is developing several of the essential lyrical features that we have been discussing: the withdrawal of personality in favour of "presence"; the isolation of the lyric moment in a "timeless" present; the pure presentation of feeling in the service of context rather than history and the symbolic transformation of external detail.