Swan song
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- For other uses, see Swan Song.
"Swan song" is a reference to an ancient belief that the Mute Swan (Cygnus olor) is completely mute during its lifespan, but may sing one heartbreakingly beautiful song just before it dies. However, it has also been known since antiquity that this belief is false; "mute" swans are not actually mute during life – they produce snorts, shrill noises, grunts, and hisses – and they do not sing as they die. In particular, Pliny the Elder refuted the belief in A.D. 77 in his Natural History (book 10, chapter xxxii: olorum morte narratur flebilis cantus, falso, ut arbitror, aliquot experimentis, "observation shows that the story that the dying swan sings is false").
Nevertheless, the legend has remained so appealing that over the centuries it has appeared in various artistic works. Aesop's fable of "The Swan Mistaken for a Goose" alludes to it.[1] Ovid mentions it in "The Story of Picus and Canens."[2]
The well-known Orlando Gibbons madrigal (The Silver Swan) states the legend thus:
- The silver Swan, who living had no Note,
- when Death approached, unlocked her silent throat.
- Leaning her breast upon the reedy shore,
- thus sang her first and last, and sang no more:
- "Farewell, all joys! O Death, come close mine eyes!
- "More Geese than Swans now live, more Fools than Wise."
Chaucer wrote of "The Ialous swan, ayens his deth that singeth".[3] In Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, Portia declaims "Let music sound while he doth make his choice;/Then, if he lose, he makes a swan-like end,/Fading in music."[4]
Tennyson's poem "The Dying Swan" is a poetic evocation of the beauty of the supposed song and so full of detail as to imply that he had actually heard it:
- The wild swan's death-hymn took the soul
- Of that waste place with joy
- Hidden in sorrow: at first to the ear
- The warble was low, and full and clear; ...
- But anon her awful jubilant voice,
- With a music strange and manifold,
- Flow’d forth on a carol free and bold;
- As when a mighty people rejoice
- With shawms, and with cymbals, and harps of gold...
By extension, swan song has become an idiom referring to a final theatrical or dramatic appearance, or any final work or accomplishment. For example, Franz Schubert's collection of songs, published in his year of death, 1828, is known as the Schwanengesang (German for "swan song"). It generally carries the connotation that the performer is aware of his or her imminent demise (or retirement) and is expending his or her last breath on one magnificent final effort. Examples of this include Queen's song "The Show Must Go On", written and performed while lead singer Freddie Mercury was dying of AIDS, Kurt Cobain's performances of "Pennyroyal Tea" and "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?" when he appeared on MTV Unplugged or even the final track on the last Nirvana studio release "All Apologies", or The Beatles final album Abbey Road ending with the final song The End. Anton Chekhov's one-act play, The Swan Song (1887), describes an aging actor who, while sitting alone in a darkened theatre, ruminates on his past.
[edit] References
- ^ Aesop (1998). The Complete Fables. Penguin Classics. ISBN 0-14-044649-4. p. 127: "The swan, who had been caught by mistake instead of the goose, began to sing as a prelude to its own demise. His voice was recognized and the song saved his life." Annotation by Robert and Olivia Temple: "The premise of this fable is the odd tradition of 'the swan song.'" [1]
- ^ Ovid. Metamorphoses (Kline) 14, the Ovid Collection, Univ. of Virginia E-Text Center; Bk XIV:320-396: The transformation of Picus. University of Virginia. "There, she poured out her words of grief, tearfully, in faint tones, in harmony with sadness, just as the swan sings once, in dying, its own funeral song."
- ^ Skeat, Walter W. (1896). Chaucer: the Minor Poems. Clarendon Press., p. 86[2]
- ^ The Merchant of Venice," Act 3 Scene 2[3]
