"Winter Swans" is not the only poem that Sheers wrote about relationship troubles. "Keyways," which appears in his first poetry collection The Blue Book, is a poem in which the speaker reflects on a relationship that has already ended. As he stands in line with his ex-girlfriend at the locksmith's, the speaker runs through the course of their relationship using the extended metaphor of keys. Similarly to "Winter Swans," the stanzas are all the same length until a final, shorter stanza: in "Winter Swans," tercets give way to a final couplet, while "Keyways" is made up of quintets until the final couplet.
The shift in the formal structure of the poems serves different purposes. For "Keyways," it provides a sense of tragic irony as the speaker remarks how strange it is to be cutting keys just when they are changing the locks. In "Winter Swans," it represents the couple's reconciliation.
Sheers succeeds in using formal structure to evoke emotional proximity or distance between the characters in his poems.
