Invective Against Swan(n)s

And the soul, O ganders, being lonely, flies
Beyond your chilly chariots, to the skies.

—Wallace Stevens, from Invective against Swans

After a visit to the Morgan Library earlier this year, I set myself the task of re-reading Proust’s Swann’s Way. I have read Proust’s entire magnum opus once with a certain amount of satisfaction (though I’ll confess to having commented at one point that Proust could have used an editor), but it seemed time to start again. (No need to rush, as copyright laws in the U.S. mean the last three volumes of this edition will not be available here until 2019—“longer than Proust’s original public had” to wait—about which I have no comment.)

Turns out that Proust was actually something of a pruner of his prose. Alex Ross reported that “one of his typescripts . . . begins”

“At the time of that morning, whose memory I would like to fix, I was already ill; I would be up all night and went to bed only during the day. However, the time when I would go to bed early and, with a few short interruptions, would sleep until morning, was not that far in the past, and I was still hoping that it would return.” Proust . . . crosses out those sentences and writes, “For a long time, I went to bed early.”

The exhibit was full of delicious details like that. One of my favorites was the revelation that the famous madeleine started its life as toast dipped in tea. Another set to rest definitively, it seemed to me, any remaining doubts about the composer of “la petite phrase” given in the novel to Proust’s fictional composer, Vinteuil:

In 1910, Proust collected material from the Saint-Beuve exercise books to create a narration about Swann. At this stage, the “little phrase” that will become the “national anthem” of Swann and Odette’s love is still referred to as a theme from Saint-Saens’s Sonata for Piano and Violin. It is only in 1913 on the galleys of Swann’s Way that it is definitely attributed to Vinteuil. [quotation from an exhibit wall plaque]

The new translation of Swann’s Way, by Lydia Davis, reads like a dream, but I nonetheless managed to stall out, if only temporarily, at the “Mama’s kiss” passage. At the same time, I got caught up in swans of the single “n” sort. I have resolved (again) to pick up the thread of Swann’s Way, but meanwhile, about those swans . . .

Sometime back, one of my favorite ModPovians* popped up on the Wallace Stevens discussion forum (which had grown into a behemoth over the life of the course) to ask why Stevens loved doves but hated swans, citing, among other things, his poem Invective against Swans. The discussion ranged from the influence of Mallarmé on Stevens to bits of scatological wit interpreting a line from Invective that certainly asks for it, “The crows anoint the statues with their dirt.” I don’t know that we concluded anything definitive, but we had fun.

Swans swam into my vision once again in John Ashbery’s These Lacustrine Cities and in the Auden poem, Lakes, that was a possible inspiration. So I thought, what the hey, it’s way too hot to go outside, let’s see what I can dig up about swans in poetry, music, and art.

It wasn’t long before I, too, was ready to hurl invectives at the poor birds. Of references to swans, there’s a never-ending stream, a lake, a geyser, a flood. Leda and the Swan, as but one example, has spawned a veritable cottage industry of its own. Aside from Yeats’s foray into that peculiar region, artists who have found the subject irresistible include Bos, Cezanne, Correggio, da Vinci, Dali, Géricault, Rubens, Tintoretto, Veronese . . . well, you get the idea. In poetry, it’s much the same; while the attitude toward them may have changed over time, swans are always with us, or so it seems.

There’s Baudelaire, from whence comes The Swan, with these lines

And there I saw, one morning at the hour
When toil awakes beneath the cold, clear sky,
And the road roars upon the silent air,
A swan who had escaped his cage, and walked
On the dry pavement with his webby feet,
And trailed his spotless plumage on the ground.

Mallarmé was no kinder to the bird:

All his neck will shake off this white death-agony
Inflicted by space on the bird which denies space
But not the horror of the earth where his wings are caught.

Yeats could be counted on to give the swan full poetic treatment, but then who wouldn’t, when, “Upon the brimming water among the stones/Are nine-and-fifty swans”?  Robinson Jeffers, too, exhorted us to Love the Wild Swan:

Does it matter whether you hate your…self? At least
Love your eyes that can see, your mind that can
Hear the music, the thunder of the wings. Love the wild swan.

Not to mention Mary Oliver, who wrote:

And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?

Ruth Schwartz had a slightly different take, I’d say: “Beauty isn’t the point here; of course/the swan is beautiful,/But . . .” , as did Ogden Nash, whose swan was “a narcissistic snob.” Well, really, what would you say about a swan who “claims to have never heard of Pavlova”?

Not only English speakers and the French are at it. Apparently, Enrique Gonzáles Martínez got so fed up with Ruben Dario’s “snow-white Olympic swan” that he proposed to Wring the Swan’s Neck (translated by Samuel Beckett, no less). I could go on and on and on . . . but I’ll stop, with just one more. I mean, after all, what’s a person to do when the best sort of blogging friend goes and quotes Olim lacus colueram in a comment? Of course, I had to look that up.

Olim lacus colueram (Once in Lakes I Made My Home)

Once in lakes I made my home,
once I dwelt in beauty;
that was when I was a swan.
Alas, poor me!
Now I am black
and roasted to a turn!

On the spit I turn and turn;
the fire roasts me through.
Now I am presented at the feast;
alas, poor me!
Now I am black
and roasted to a turn!

Now in a serving dish I lie,
and can no longer fly.
Gnashing teeth confront me.
Alas, poor me!
Now I am black
and roasted to a turn!

Now, those medieval Goliards really knew how to skewer a swan!

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Listening List  

For a listening list on Spotify, click here.

On Youtube:

Arcadelt, Il bianco e dolce cigno

Saint-Saëns, Le Cygne

Nathan Chan isn’t 11 anymore, but he spoke so touchingly about Le Cygne, I wanted to post a link to the video. For a current, and lovely, performance by him, click here.)

Here is Pavlova dancing to the choreography of Mikhail Fokine:

Tchaikovsky, Danse des Cygnes, Coda, from Swan Lake

Sibelius, The Swan of Tuonela, from the Lemminkäinen Suite 

Orff, olim lacus colueram, from Carmina Burana

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Postscript: For the rest of the summer, I’ll be offline more than on. As I write, the weather is projected to be less onerous for a while—let us hope—and real live guests will be joining us here in August. Not to mention my promise to myself to get back to Swann. Though it’s possible I could get derailed once again . . .

I look forward to reconnecting with you all in September, if not before.

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Credits: The quotations may be found at the links indicated in the text. The photographs are my own.

*“ModPovians” is my term for participants in the Modern and Contemporary Poetry MOOC, which will be offered again this September.