The Wild Swans at Coole

“The Wild Swans at Coole” depicts a person sitting at a pond reminiscing about previous times when he used to see the swans. The speaker is never directly talked about; however, we do know that the speaker is somewhat old since it’s their “nineteenth autumn...”(7) since they started counting. From this information we can infer that the person telling this story is someone who’s older since, if they started counting from the time they were first able to, they’d be off to college by the time they got to nineteen. The narrorator is looking back on a previous time that he misses, we can see evidence of this since when once the swans are no longer there his “...heart is sore...”(14). The narrorator seems themselves in the swans since at the end of the poem they remark “Delight men’s eyes when I awake some day”(29). From this perspective we can tell that the narrorator sees the swans finding mates mirroring their own life.