Today’s Poem: Swans

Sadness is a gift and a charism

Edward Lear, Domestic Swan, c. 1860. (Lear, 1812–1888, was not only a writer of nonsense verse but one of the great ornithological artists of the Victorian era.) Wikimedia Commons.

If hendecasyllabics are hard to write in English verse, it’s not because the meter itself is difficult. All poets need to do is to get an eleven-syllable rhythm bouncing along — often in a pattern like this: \u\uu\u\u\u, or BAM ba, BAM ba ba, BAM ba, BAM ba, BAM ba. It’s not the most intuitive of meters in English, but once it’s up and running in a poet’s head, the lines pour out like the billy-o. So, for example, Tennyson’s imitation of Catullus: “O you chorus of indolent reviewers, / Irresponsible, indolent reviewers.”

There are other patterns the hendecasyllabic might use, or even no set pattern at all (just a making sure that there are eleven syllables in the line, like a poetic bean-counting). And alcaic stanzas — another occasionally encountered English form borrowed from ancient languages, especially back in the Victorian days of schoolchildren brought up on Latin — open with a pair of hendecasyllabic lines typically with a different metrical pattern. Still, that regular hendecasyllabic line shows up in English in, say, “For Once, Then, Something,” where Robert Frost does the line so easily and regularly, never straining for effect or stumbling in diction, that it seems an inspiration:

Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs 
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing 
Deeper down in the well than where the water 
Gives me back in a shining surface picture . . .

Certainly the Frost example inspired Sally Thomas (b. 1964), one of the co-founders of Poems Ancient and Modern. She hardly needs introduction to readers of this newsletter. The author of the 2020 poetry collection Motherland and the more recent novel, Works of Mercy — and editor, with the critic Micah Mattix, of the new anthology, Christian Poetry in America Since 1940 — she is a writer in North Carolina with a deep appreciation of formal verse and two new volumes coming out soon: a prose collection called The Blackbird and Other Stories and a new book of poetry, Among the Living.

Sally Thomas

In “Swans,” Thomas uses the hendecasyllabic line to sketch three moments: a sight along an English summer towpath of what seemed to be abandoned swan eggs, a later sighting of young swans who may have emerged from the eggs she had thought dead, and, finally — later still, while herself heavy with child — walking along the towpath and seeing perhaps the same swans, sliding along through the water.

The root here is a maternal inversion, focused on the dead eggs, that sees the world as it may be for the self and its offspring: “gray, empty,” with a “mess of twigs, leaves, and feathers.” Sadness is a burden, heavy as pregnancy, and yet, for artist and mother alike — both creators — a “gift and charism.”

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Swans 

by Sally Thomas

All that summer the sun refused to open 
On the sky, and the river carried rain-spots 
Down and over the weir, and by the footbridge 
Swans’ eggs chilled in their nest. I saw them, rained on, 
Blue and dead as the moon the clouds were hiding 
Every night when I looked to find it. What could 
Live, neglected like that? The wind, cold and green 
With the smell of the hawthorn flowering, came 
Brooding over the fens, but what could it bring me, 
Who had chosen to view the world with sadness, 
Or had taken its sadness into myself, 
Gift and charism? One day, though, I saw them, 
Triple vee-wakes on dark tree-printed currents: 
One ahead of the others, big and whiter  
Than the cloud-pale sky. Two cygnets, gray, living, 
Broken free from the death I’d assumed for them. 
Well, their ways are not my ways. The next summer,  
Walking that same towpath, heavy with a child 
Who had come to me after years of asking — 
Who was taking his time just then, head downward, 
Happy where he was — I saw them paddling 
Under the bridge, where it laid out its shadow, 
Current-rumpled. The same swans? Or three strangers 
Hummed down onto a river pricked with sunlight, 
Strange and new as the season? I can’t say now. 
I remember the baby’s head engaging,  
Heavy, ready, real, an impending pressure.  
I remember the wakes widening, the river 
Flowing down in the sun, and by the footbridge,  
Gray, empty, the mess of twigs, leaves, and feathers.

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