Two swans in a pond
19 December 2022
A swansong is the final work or performance of an artist. The word comes from the belief that just before dying a swan, a bird not known for its song, will utter one beautiful melody. The phrase doesn’t appear in English until the sixteenth century, but the belief dates to antiquity.
Ovid, for instance, references the belief in Book 14 of the Metamorphoses in describing the death of Caieta, the wet-nurse of Aeneas:
ultimus adspexit Thybris luctuque viaque
fessam et iam longa ponentem corpora ripa.
illic cum lacrimis ipso modulata dolore
verba sono tenui maerens fundebat, ut olim
carmina iam moriens canit exequialia cycnus;(Tiber was last to see her, weary with grief and journeying, laying her body down on his wide banks. There, with tears, her grief set to music, she poured out her mournful words in feeble tones, just as the swan, in dying, sometimes sings a funeral song.)
Chaucer, in the late fourteenth century, also references the myth, although like Ovid he does not use the word or exact phrase. From the ending of the poem Anelida and Arcite, about a jilted lover:
But as the swan, I have herd seyd ful yore,
Ayeins his deth shal singen his penaunce,
So singe I here my destinee or chaunce,
How that Arcite Anelida so sore
Hath thirled with the poynt of remembraunce.(But like the swan, I have heard said of yore,
Facing his death shall sing his penance,
So sing I here my destiny or fate,
How that Arcite so sorely
Has stabbed Anelida with the point of remembrance.)
As for the term swansong itself, that is in place by 1597, when it appears in William Warner’s Albion’s England:
But now must end our Swan-song, now the Swan himselfe must end,
Euen he, that toyld such tedious Seas his Countries weale to mend,
Returning Homewards, neere at Home, euen on the Scottish Cost,
Did wracke, and those aboord his Ship then perished for most.
Swansong is a compound that was most likely formed in English, although it appears in European languages at about the same time. German has Schwanengesang from 1561 and Middle French chant du cycne from 1546 in reference to the swan’s singing, although use of those terms to refer to an artist’s final work come later than the English. How these parallel developments influenced the English term, or vice versa, is anyone’s guess.
Sources:
Chaucer, Geoffrey. “Anelida and Arcite.” The Riverside Chaucer, third edition, Larry D. Benson, ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987, lines 346–50, 381.
Ovid. Metamorphoses, vol. 2 of 2, books 9–15 (Ovid vol. 4 of 6), second edition. Loeb Classical Library 43. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984, 14.426–30, 330.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2021, s.v. swansong, n.
Warner, William. Albions England. London: Widow Orwin for Ioan Broome, 1597, 11.65, 280. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Photo credit: Marek Szczepanek, 2005. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.