Mine ancient song with gathered music sweet—
By fanes o’erthrown,
By cities known of old, and classic woods,
And, strangely sad, in deep-leaved northern solitudes?”
If those living Avian gems aglow amid the trees that form Earth’s emerald diadem, are the jewels of Nature’s crown, then is the great white swan afloat upon the ripples of her glistening lakes and seas, a shimmering pearl amid the chasing of her silver breastplate.
Yet it was not the beautiful Mute Swan, most beautiful, most stately, and most silent of all created beings, that typified to the men of old the reincarnation of the poet’s soul; neither the Trumpeter, with its loud clarion, but the more slender Singing Swan of song and story, that “thro’ its deathless music sent a dying moan.” It was to this swan alone that the ancients could attribute the power of melody—the singular faculty of tuning its dying dirge from among the reedy marshes of its final retreat, where “in a low, plaintive and stridulous voice, in the moment of death, it murmured forth its last prophetic sigh;” and it was this swan, too, that inspired the philosopher Pythagoras to teach that the souls of poets passed at death into swans and retained the powers of harmony they had possessed in their human forms.
M. Antoine thinks that it is not improbable that the popular and poetical notion of the singing of the swan was derived from the doctrine of the transmigration of souls; yet the traveler Pausanius, who spake as one having authority, affirmed the swan to be “the glory of music,” at the same time preserving the following testimony to the repute of the swan as a bird of prophecy: “In the night before Plato was to become the pupil of Sokrates, the latter in a dream saw a swan take refuge in his bosom. Now the swan has a reputation for music, because a man who loved music very much, Kuknos, the king of the Ligyes beyond the Eridanus, is said to have ruled the land of the Kelts. People relate concerning him that, through the will of Apollo, he was changed after his death into a swan.” From this evidence Pausanius thus subtracts the weight of his private opinion: “I am willing to believe that a man who loved music may have ruled over the Ligyes, but that a human being was turned into a bird is a thing impossible for me to believe.”
Mr. Rennie cites, also: “In his Phaedro, Plato makes Socrates thus express himself: ‘When swans perceive approaching death, they sing more merrily than before because of the joy they have in going to the God they serve; but men, through fear of death, reproach the swans, saying that they lament their death and sing their grief in sorrowful tones.’ After digressing to assert that no bird sings when either hungry or sorrowful, he resumes, ‘Far less do the swans sing out of grief, which, by reason of their belonging to Apollo, are diviners, and sing more joyfully on the day of their death than ever before, as foreseeing the good that awaits them in the other world.’”
Charles de Kay wrote: “Not the magnificence merely, but the element of superstitious reverence accounts for the frequency of the swan as a crest and charge of coats of arms,” stating that in heraldry the swan runs back through heraldic devices to totemism, and that among the “oath-birds” which wizards of Lapland called upon in their incantations, the swan often figured.
It is also asserted that German local legends retain the idea of the swan as an uncanny bird, prophetic of death or the under world, and that the Klagesee, or Lake of Complaining, near Liban, was so named from the numbers of musical swans that congregated there.