The Swan’s Death Song.
The car of Juno is fabled to have been drawn by swans. They were dedicated to Venus and Apollo. To the latter, according to Banier, because they were “reckoned to have by instinct a faculty of prediction;” but it is possible that they were consecrated to the deity of music, from their fabled melody at the moment of death.
Buffon says, the ordinary voice of the tame swan is rather low than canorous. It is a sort of creaking, exactly like what is vulgarly called the swearing of a cat, and which the ancients denoted by the imitative word drensare. It would seem to be an accent of menace or anger; nor does its love appear to have a softer. In the “Mémoires de l’Académie des Inscriptions” is a dissertation by M. Morin, entitled, “Why swans, which sung so well formerly, sing so ill now.”
The French naturalist further remarks, that “swans, almost mute, like ours in the domestic state, could not be those melodious birds which the ancients have celebrated and extolled. But the wild swan appears to have better preserved its prerogatives; and with the sentiment of entire liberty, it has also the tones. The bursts of its voice form a sort of modulated song.” He then cites the observations of the abbé Arnaud on the song of two wild swans which settled on the magnificent pools of Chantilly. “One can hardly say that the swans of Chantilly sing, they cry; but their cries are truly and constantly modulated; their voice is not sweet; on the contrary, it is shrill, piercing, and rather disagreeable; I could compare it to nothing better than the sound of a clarionet, winded by a person unacquainted with the instrument. Almost all the melodious birds answer to the song of man, and especially to the sound of instruments: I played long on the violin beside our swans, on all the tones and chords. I even struck unison to their own accents, without their seeming to pay the smallest attention: but if a goose be thrown into the basin where they swim with their young, the male, after emitting some hollow sounds, rushes impetuously upon the goose, and seizing it by the neck, plunges the head repeatedly under water, striking it at the same time with his wings; it would be all over with the goose, if it were not rescued. The swan, with his wings expanded, his neck stretched, and his head erect, comes to place himself opposite to his female, and utters a cry, to which the female replies by another, which is lower by half a tone. The voice of the male passes from A (la) to B flat (si bémol); that of the female, from G sharp (sol dièse) to A. The first note is short and transient, and has the effect of that which our musicians call sensible; so that it is not detached from the second, but seems to slip into it. Fortunately for the ear, they do not both sing at once; in fact, if while the male sounded B flat, the female struck A, or if the male uttered A, while the female gave G sharp, there would result the harshest and most insupportable of discords. We may add, that this dialogue is subjected to a constant and regular rhythm, with the measure of two times.”
M. Grouvelle observes, that “there is a season when the swans assemble together, and form a sort of commonwealth; it is during severe colds. When the frost threatens to usurp their domain, they congregate and dash the water with all the extent of their wings, making a noise which is heard very far, and which, whether in the night or the day, is louder in proportion as it freezes more intensely. Their efforts are so effectual, that there are few instances of a flock of swans having quitted the water in the longest frosts, though a single swan, which has strayed from the general body, has sometimes been arrested by the ice in the middle of the canals.”
Buffon further remarks, that the shrill and scarcely diversified notes of the loud clarion sounds, differ widely from the tender melody, the sweet and brilliant variety of our chanting birds. Yet it was not enough that the swan sung admirably, the ancients ascribed to it a prophetic spirit. It alone, of animated beings, which all shudder at the prospect of destruction, chanted in the moment of its agony, and with harmonious sounds prepared to breathe the last sigh. They said that when about to expire, and to bid a sad and tender adieu to life, the swan poured forth sweet and affecting accents, which, like a gentle and doleful murmur, with a voice low, plaintive, and melancholy, formed its funeral song. This tearful music was heard at the dawn of day, when the winds and the waves were still: and they have been seen expiring with the notes of their dying hymn. No fiction of natural history, no fable of antiquity, was ever more celebrated, oftener repeated, or better received. It occupied the soft and lively imaginations of the Greeks: poets, orators, even philosophers adopted it as a truth too pleasing to be doubted. And well may we excuse such fables; they were amiable and affecting; they were worth many dull, insipid truths; they were sweet emblems to feeling minds. The swan, doubtless, chants not its approaching end; but, in speaking of the last flight, the expiring effort of a fine genius, we shall ever, with tender melancholy, recal the classical and pathetic expression, “It is the song of the swan!”