Started, to find man’s dwelling there
In her own fields of silent air.
Even more poetic is the tale of the death-chant of the swan, still more than half-believed by most folks, for we constantly use it as a figure of speech, describing in a word, for example, the final protest of a discarded office-seeker as his “swan-song.” It is useless to hunt for the origin of this notion—it was current at any rate in Aristotle’s time, for he writes: “Swans have the power of song, especially when near the end of their life, and some persons, sailing near the coast of Libya, have met many of them in the sea singing a mournful song and have afterwards seen some of them die.” Pliny, Ælian (who called Greece “mother of lies”), Pausanias and other more recent philosophers, denied that there was any truth in this statement; but the sentimental public, charmed by the pathos of the picture presented to their imaginations, and refusing to believe that in reality this bird’s only utterance is a whoop, or a trumpet-like note, have kept it alive aided by the poets who have found it a useful fancy—for example Byron, who moans
Place me on Sunium’s marbled steep,
Where nothing save the waves and I
May hear our mutual murmurs sweep;
There, swan-like, let me sing and die.
The poets are not to be quarrelled with too severely on this account. It must be conceded that our literature would have been considerably poorer had poets declined to accept all that travellers and country folk told them. Chaucer uses the “swan-song,” and Shakespeare often alludes to it, as in Othello:
I will play the swan and die in music.
A swan-like end, fading in music.