Which is the best sufficiently narrowed topic for a response to literature? “the wild swans at coole” seems like the sort of poem an old man would write. the swans in yeats’s “the wild swans at coole” symbolize the speaker’s youth. the speaker in yeats’s “the wild swans at coole” has a variety of emotional reactions to seeing a flock of wild swans. yeats’s poem “the wild swans at coole” is pretty straightforward.