The swan (Greek kyknos, Latin cycnus or cygnus, or olor) has long been one of the most popular birds in poetry, not least because of the association of swans with poets themselves. The trumpet-like call of some swans apparently sounded beautiful to ancient ears; Virgil in Eclogues 9.29 refers to the famous singing swans of his city, Mantua, and Lucretius compares the song of the swan with the art of the lyre (2.503). We learn in Aristophanes’ Birds that the swan is the bird of Apollo, god of poetry (869); see Martial 13.77. In Latin poetry it is also sometimes the bird of Venus, who is borne by a chariot of swans in Ovid (Met. 10.717) and Horace (3.28.13--15). It became a commonplace of modesty to contrast one’s own song (or poem) to another poet’s as a goose’s (or swallow’s) song beside a swan’s: see Eclogues 8.55, 9.36, Lucretius 3.6--7; Shelley playfully repeats the gesture by comparing his poem to an ephemeral fly that cannot climb to the heights where the swan sings (Witch of Atlas 9--12). Theocritus, in Idyll 5.136, has a goatherd boast of his singing prowess by using the comparison in reverse. Horace elaborates a
conceit in which he is transmogrified into a swan and flies over many nations, that is, he shall gain great fame as a poet (Odes 2.20). Pope, in ‘‘On the Candidates for the Laurel,’’ deploys the comparison with his usual wit. Unable to endorse any of the candidates for the office of poet laureate, he seizes on Stephen Duck, a poet of very minor talent: ‘‘Let’s rather wait one year for
better luck; / One year may make a singing swan of Duck.’’
In describing Pindar as the ‘‘swan of Dirce’’ (one of the rivers of Thebes), Horace (4.2.25--27) began a tradition that continued into modern times, e.g., Homer is the Swan of Meander, Shakespeare is the ‘‘Sweet Swan of Avon’’ (from Jonson’s memorial poem), Vaughan is the Swan of Usk, and so on. This convention depends, of course, on the fact that, as Ovid puts it, ‘‘swans love the streams’’ (Metamorphoses 2.539). (See River.) Or the poet’s city is named, as when Cowper calls Virgil ‘‘the Mantuan swan’’ (Table Talk 557), or the nation, as when Garnier addresses Ronsard ‘‘O Swan of the French’’ (‘‘Elegy on the Death of Ronsard’’ 50).
As swans are migratory, and are frequently seen alone, they can be imagined as exiles from their homelands. So Shelley, referring to Byron’s emigration to Italy, writes, ‘‘a tempest-cleaving Swan / Of the songs of Albion, / Driven from his ancestral streams / By the might of evil dreams, / Found a nest in thee [Venice]’’ (‘‘Euganean Hills’’ 174--78). Baudelaire in ‘‘Le Cygne’’
describes a swan escaped from a menagerie, crying for water and dreaming of his native lake. Mallarme’s best-known sonnet, Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui, likens the new ‘‘today’’ to a swan caught in the ice of a lake of past failures to fly: it might tear itself free but it remains fast in useless exile. See also Edmund Gosse’s ‘‘The Swan.’’ Yeats in ‘‘1919’’ writes, ‘‘Some moralist or mythological poet / Compares the solitary soul to a swan’’; he is probably alluding to Shelley’s Alastor 275--90, where the wandering poet contrasts his own homelessness with the flight of a swan to his nest and mate. It was also thought that swans sang at their deaths. Clytemnestra in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon 1444--45 gloats that Cassandra cried out at her death
like a swan. Plato has Socrates disparage this belief as a human projection (Phaedo 85a), but Socrates’ opinion did not much affect the poets. It was so commonplace a belief that Seneca can allude to the sweetness of a swan’s last song (Phaedra 301). Chaucer names ‘‘The jelous swan, ayens his deth that syngeth’’ (PF 342). When Ronsard declares he is weary of life, he sings his passing ‘‘the way a swan does, / Who sings its death on the banks of the Meander’’ (sonnet: ‘‘Il faut laisser maisons’’). Shakespeare has: ‘‘And now this pale swan in her wat’ry nest / Begins the sad dirge of her certain ending’’ (Lucrece 1611--12). The phrase ‘‘swan song’’ often refers to the last work of a poet or musician. Ovid declares the final book of his Tristia to be the sorrowful song of a swan (5.1.11--14), probably the passage Dar’?o invokes when he writes, ‘‘I salute you [swans] now as in Latin verses / Publius Ovidius Naso once saluted you’’ (‘‘Los Cisnes’’ 5--6). Yeats in ‘‘The Tower’’ beautifully describes ‘‘the hour / When the swan must fix his eye / Upon a fading gleam, / Float out upon a long / Last reach of glittering stream / And there sing his last song.’’ The image is implicit in Tennyson’s ‘‘The Lady of Shalott,” where the Lady, whose magic web and mirror are destroyed when she looks down to Camelot, lies down, ‘‘robed in snowy white” (136), in a boat and sings her last song as she floats downstream.
An ancient myth tells how Zeus in the form of a swan raped Leda, who then gave birth to Helen and Clytemnestra from one egg and Castor and Pollux from another. It was a popular subject in ancient art, and several of the Renaissance masters painted it (e.g., Michaelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael). See also Dar’?o’s ‘‘Leda’’ and Yeats’s ‘‘Leda and the Swan.’’ Tennyson knew some of the legends about swan-maidens and swan-princes that were common in the Middle Ages; the best-known of these is the tale of Lohengrin. After Wagner’s opera Lohengrin mysterious swans swim through Symbolist poems, notably in many by Dar’?o, who celebrates a new ‘‘Wagnerian swan,” which will grasp beauty (Leda) and/or conceive a greater ideal beauty (Helen) (‘‘The Swan”); it is ‘‘the poet of perfect verses” (‘‘Blazon”).
- From Cambridge Dictionary Of Literary Symbols
