I don’t know where they came from.
I saw the last one arrive, descending with an easy parachute grace, its great wings cupping the air as its splayed feet touched the water, entered it, so that it landed with barely a splash. It folded its wings, settled with the others, afloat. There are twelve, dazzling as light, clean-lined as if cut from tin, their long necks flexible as snakes. Feeding, always feeding, their hose necks deep in the flow, bodies still as white stones, legs and feet working invisibly to keep them still, white islands pointing upstream that the river cuts around like bridge piers. Always feeding, as if they are storing up for some grand endeavour.

And always the sense that, along with their vivid presence here, they have a bigger life, somewhere else.

I saw a swan take off from this river sixty, seventy years ago. I’m not sure I’ve seen one take off since, but so clear is the memory that it might have happened a moment ago.

It was the root, that taking off, the metaphor at the heart of a song of my youth, a song of love, liberation and loss.

The ‘fair and perfect’ swan:
“A living curve of whiteness, and so effortlessly free –
but held down by the legs that you can’t see.
so she hisses out in anger, when she feels herself endangered,
when you come too close for comfort, and she feels herself less free.”

The swan about to fly:
“As she leans into the water, her wings are beating faster,
her feet are pounding madly and she’s straining to be free …
and awkwardness the only thing you see –
but the beauty of a creature that’s not swimming now not flying yet,
is reaching for the vision she can be.”

The swan in the sky:
“The air all around her, the earth far beneath,
her wings in perfect motion and her head stretched to the sun –
you’re thinking to yourself, what has she done …?”

And never knowing if she did, that girl, reach her vision.

It was the pivot point, that taking off, the metaphor and analogue for a story of the journey to the mid-point of life, where there is the possibility of passing from the given life to the revealed life.
Told as the tale of a swan that devoted his life to learning to fly, in a world in which swans did not fly:

“At last, after many trials, pounding it seemed endlessly across the water, his feet were suddenly released from the gluey grip of the water, the wind swept under his wings, and he was in the air. A door opened and he passed from a small dark room into a golden world of limitless possibility – before hitting the water with such a crash that the old swan had to drag him out. ‘You started to dream, didn’t you?’ he smiled. ‘Your attention must never waiver. Flying is not a pleasure to be enjoyed but a condition that can, at first, only be maintained by absolute concentration. It is freedom: but not freedom from – freedom to do. It happens when you become responsible for yourself.’”

Years of my life without rivers, without swans.

And then, old, on Delos, the island around which the Cyclades turn, I heard the story of the birth there of Apollo, leader of the chorus of Muses, god of the beauty “that is the beginning of a terror that we are just able to endure, and we adore because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.” At the moment of Apollo’s birth the wandering island put down golden roots, the streams ran gold, and swans flew seven times round the island singing his praises. The same swans pulled his chariot through the sky to exile in Britain, where he was worshipped ‘in a circular temple’.

Metaphor, analogue, myth. Where they come from, the swans on the river, I don’t know. And where they go to. But it is important that I pay attention to them, here, and that their presence reminds me of the larger life. And perhaps one day I will see one take off, towards that larger life.

Note: the quotation, about beauty being the beginning of terror, is from Rilke’s First Duino Elegy.
Quotations are from:
Swan Song, by Keith Walton.
Song of Swans, by Keith Walton.