" It's a swan song "

In Latin poetry, for example Horace's Odes, the poet metamorphoses into a swan, and the death lament is a song of immortality. In Ovid's Tristes , the swan is associated with old age and exile : age whitens the hair, which becomes the color of the swan, acquiring the majesty and harmony of its plumage. In Ovid, swan song and exile are clearly associated to form the senile sublime. His exile recalls the migration of birds, and the death of the poet-bird is all the more painful for being far from home. Ovid's exile would become a Romantic theme, found in paintings by Turner and Delacroix.

For Aristotle, the swan is a songbird that gives voice, particularly as death approaches. Maintaining a mixture of the sublime and the abominable, the philosopher adds, like Pliny the Elder, that swans devour each other. It's another fable. For the sophist Elian, swans, servants of Apollo, also sing and surpass man thanks to their gift of divination and the serenity they experience as death approaches; their final song is an aria to the glory of the gods as well as their own. The medieval imagination has perpetuated this representation : the whiteness of the bird recalls purity and age ; the swan is the supreme and sublime singer, the emblem of the poet.

Yet Buffon asserts that swans are hoarse-voiced, that they scream but don't sing. Rather silent, they have the organs of a voice, but make a singular stride : they drone. Buffon believes he found the term in Ovid, but the source is a later compilation. The image also appears in Ronsard, notably in his last sonnet, when he speaks of " chanter son obsèque en la façon du cygne ".

The metaphor's greatest fortune coincides with Romantic poetry. Sainte-Beuve considers that Buffon, evoking the sublime song of the swan and dying shortly afterwards, can apply this image to himself, just as Bossuet pronounced his last funeral oration, that of the Grand Condé. In his Mémoires d'outre-tombe, Chateaubriand recounts the death of Pauline de Beaumont, turning mourning into a letter he sends to all his friends. The writer reads his dying friend a letter from his sister Lucile : he acts as a link between the two women, pure white swans. According to Sainte-Beuve, it was with Chateaubriand that the swan became so prominent in Romantic poetry. For example, Chateaubriand's August resignation speech 1830 to the Chambre des Pairs will be remembered as Chateaubriand's " swan song ". He delivers it in tears, like a useless Cassandra : his cry is mournful and prophetic, like that of the swan.

If Lamartine is the swan par excellence, Victor Hugo is an eagle. For Sainte-Beuve, the swan was transmitted from Chateaubriand to Lamartine. It then invaded all poetry, right up to Mallarmé in " Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui ", where the bird, caught in the ice, evokes the theme of exile. Barbey d'Aurevilly ridiculed the image in his review of Bouvard et Pécuchet, in which he judged Flauber's swan song to be more akin to a goose call, or even a duck call.