The Silver Swan
The silver swan, who living had no note,
When death approached, unlocked her silent throat;
Leaning her breast against the reedy shore,
Thus sung her first and last, and sung no more.
Farewell, all joys; O Death, come close mine eyes;
More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise.
(Liza Voronin/The Epoch Times)
The term “swan song” derives from the ancient myth of the mute swan breaking into a chorus of heavenly notes as it feels its life fading away. A favorite subject of Classical and Renaissance authors, the idea continues to haunt us today.
The Roman poet Ovid wrote: “The swan sings once, in dying, its own funeral song.” Shakespeare refers to the “pale faint swan/ Who chants a doleful hymn to his own death.”
Tennyson’s poem “The Dying Swan” describes an “awful jubilant voice,/ With a music strange and manifold”—words that inspired Michel Fokine’s short ballet of the same name, danced by a century of ballerinas to Saint-Saëns’s melancholy cello.
Of course, like most great myths, it is not remotely true. Far from being silent, swans are happy to honk, grunt, and hiss; and, disappointingly, they don’t trill when they expire. However, the image allows us to meditate on certain profound features of our journey from cradle to grave.
In Gibbons’s poem, we reflect on the wonder and transience of beauty, the triumph of ignorance, and the drama of our last breath. His words have a quiet, sweet severity. His “silver swan” shines like a white sapphire as she swims into the mind’s eye, unlocking her “silent throat” in song. “Leaning” her “breast” against the “shore,” she is clearly weak as she says farewell and calls on death to come.
Calmly devastating, these words were written as a madrigal to be sung by five unaccompanied singers. Through the power of poetry and music, we experience that intoxicating moment where life is felt to the deepest pulsation, before the heart fails.
In the final line, our focus shifts from the swan’s suffering to the world beyond the reeds. We move from personal tragedy to the decay of society. As the gaggling, garrulous geese have crowded out the noble-souled swans, so the “fools” have triumphed over the “wise.”
It is Socrates who teaches us not to despair at this. As a wise man sentenced to death by fools, the philosopher cheerfully compared himself to the dying swan as he prepared to drink the hemlock that would silence his voice forever.
For him, when swans tire of life, “they sing more merrily than before, because of the joy they have in going to the God they serve.” He awaited not darkness, but light.
Orlando Gibbons (1583–1625) was a leading English composer. Christopher Nield is a poet living in London.
