In the 19th century, Lamartine was identified with the swan and its song. After his political failure against Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, the poet suffered a long and sad old age, a kind of swan song that lasted 20 years. In L'Abdication du poète (The Poet's Abdication), Maurice Barrès pities the poet who, after losing power, uttered his long swan song. According to Barrès, the poet's end reveals his truth, his mystery. Lamartine appears as a banished swan, and here Barrès declines his traditionalism, which can also be seen in his affection for the image of the old oak tree or the old dog.
Lamartine's clear genius has become a dark, melancholy star. After his political failure, his song is that of the slaughtered swan ; possessing the head and eyes of the eagle, but also the neck of the swan, he combines, according to Barrès, the two symbolic birds. The poem " Au Comte d'Orsay " is dedicated to the man who made his bust ; on seeing it, Lamartine fell into melancholy, as neither the bust nor the poet's name would soon mean anything to anyone. We also know from one account that Lamartine saw in his poem a sublime " va-te-faire foutre " hurled at the people. The insult is yet another example of the senile sublime, and once again it's the poet's own eulogy : his swan song.
The swan also appears in Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Proust and Roland Barthes, whose " l'aile du non-écrire " evokes Baudelaire's " le vent de l'aile de l'imbécillité ". Swans are silent, but their wings rustle. In his play The Swan Song, the young Chekhov presents an old actor, who gives his swan song, his last performance. The character has fallen asleep drunk in his dressing room after a gala in his honor ; in the middle of the night, alone in the closed theater, he stumbles upon his prompter and recalls his successes before he became a buffoon : it's almost the Beckett of Fin de partie, whose swan song is as much individual as it is collective, as it marks the end of an era and a civilization.
