I’ve been blessed to see wild swans in County Sligo, Ireland with my four-year old daughter.  She was four at the time. I thought then of Yeats’ wild swans at Coole, of course, but that was before I had read this poem by Heaney.  Certainly Heaney is in every way Yeats’ successor. I think other poets of lesser stature would think twice before mentioning wild swans, just out of deference to the great Yeats?  On that same trip, we also saw wild river salmon, jumping upstream. You have to be patient, of course, but my four-year-old was, and these are the moments that can, as the poet says, blow your heart wide open