Published 1830; ‘Juvenilia’. The widespread tradition of the swan’s deathsong was discussed in William Hone’s Every-Day Book (1827 edn, ii 964–8), the acknowledged source of St Simeon Stylites. Turner (p. 47) notes that, in Ovid, ‘Dido begins her complaint to Aeneas in the Heroides, by comparing herself to a white swan, singing by the river Maeander, just before its death… it is noticeable that [T.] makes his swan female (l. 28), and gives her a backcloth of snow-capped mountains, much more appropriate to the Maeander (overlooked by Mount Latmos) than to any English fen-country.’ C. B. Stevenson studies the dying swan in mythology and throughout T., in relation to his hopes for art (Studies in English Literature xx, 1980, 621–35).
The plain was grassy, wild and bare,
Wide, wild, and open to the air,
Which had built up everywhere
An under-roof of doleful gray.
With an inner voice the river ran,
Adown it floated a dying swan,
And loudly did lament.
It was the middle of the day.
Ever the weary wind went on,
And took the reed-tops as it went.
Some blue peaks in the distance rose,
And white against the cold-white sky,
Shone out their crowning snows.
One willow over the river wept,
And shook the wave as the wind did sigh;
Above in the wind was the swallow,
Chasing itself at its own wild will,
And far through the marish green and still
The tangled water-courses slept,
Shot over with purple, and green, and yellow.
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;
And floating about the under-sky,
Prevailing in weakness, the coronach stole
Sometimes afar, and sometimes anear;
But anon her awful jubilant voice,
With a music strange and manifold,
Flowed forth on a carol free and bold;
As when a mighty people rejoice
With shawms, and with cymbals, and harps of gold,
And the tumult of their acclaim is rolled
Through the open gates of the city afar,
To the shepherd who watcheth the evening star.
And the creeping mosses and clambering weeds,
And the willow-branches hoar and dank,
And the wavy swell of the soughing reeds,
And the wave-worn horns of the echoing bank,
And the silvery marish-flowers that throng
The desolate creeks and pools among,
Were flooded over with eddying song.
¶97.7. And] 1850; Which 1830–48.
9. weary wind: Ode to Memory 113, and also three times in Shelley.
16. was] 1842; sung 1830.
17. Cp. Wordsworth, Westminster Bridge 12: ‘The river glideth at his own sweet will’.
21. wild swan: since the tradition excluded the domestic swan (a point made by Hone). took: enraptured.
26. coronach: ‘Gaelic funeral-song’ (T.). C. B. Stevenson notes that the word implies a group of people lamenting.
30. free and bold: cp. Hone, ‘with the sentiment of entire liberty, it has also the tones’.
31–4. Based on Iliad iv 452–5. T. here anticipates Ode on Wellington 142–7 (p. 494).
33. Cp. ‘tumult of acclaim’, In Memoriam lxxv 20, and To Poesy [Religion] 8.
38. soughing: ‘Anglo-Saxon sweg, a sound. Modified into an onomatopoeic word for the soft sound or the deep sighing of the wind’ (T.).
42. Cp. Timbuctoo 9: ‘were flooded over with clear glory’.