Why the swan
Because the swan floats
up close.
Because the swan has no life
off past the cut-off.
Because the swan is a knife
turned in on itself.
Because the swan erases
unwhite surfaces.
Because the swan is a sign of
what to expect, like a specked cough.
Because the swan isn’t
drawn like an ear. It listens
but it won’t hear, won’t look
up in time. It’s as if it’s stuck.
Because the air shushes sirens,
because the canal divulges silence,
because the curves have been stolen
from what’s left of the swan,
which is its song, of course –
the long stretch between locks.
The author of this week’s poem will be known to many readers of this series as the enigmatically named commenter nosuchzone. Largely spared a formal education, and entirely innocent of the university Eng Lit or creative writing courses, Andrew Lambeth is a typographer and editor, still comparatively new to writing poetry. Regulars of this blog will already know how good and original a poet he is from the distinctive work he posts below the line. Publication is not a priority for him, but it’s still good to see that his work is beginning to be more widely recognised. Recently, for example, he was published by Helen Mort and Stuart Maconie in their anthology of pub-related poetry, One for the Road.
It’s surprising, at first glance, to find him writing about a swan. Swans, after all, are the most literary of birds. A substantial and high-quality swan-poem anthology would begin with Orlando Gibbons and welcome into its pages, among others, WB Yeats, Sara Teasdale, Stevie Smith and Baudelaire with his almost unbearably tragic Le Cygne. These poetic swans are variously symbolic: in Teasdale’s verses, for example, they are a silent chorus, an unspoken erotic commentary. Swans aren’t always associated with grief and death, an association born of the once widely held but baseless notion that they sing only when about to die. The Greek legend in which Apollo’s soul becomes a swan may be more significant; write about a swan, and you’re inevitably writing about high art. Whatever they symbolise, poetry’s swans are rarely non-iconic. As in real life, a swan is a powerful, ambivalent presence, both coarse and ethereal, with a neck like a weaponised question mark.
Lambeth’s title, Why the swan, could be interpreted as a question, possibly about the swan’s status as poetic material, with the ensuing couplets (all of which, apart from the last, start with “Because”) forming a list of unpredictable answers. The poem may want to explain each time, “this is why swans are supercharged visual and literary emblems” and perhaps, also, explain why they shouldn’t be so stereotyped. But it also seems, at least sometimes, that the poem is asking plaintively why this particular swan has been singled out, not for poetry, but for abuse. Early on, the truncated-seeming lines, with their unexpected breaks and unsettling para-rhyme, intimate mortality: “the swan has no life / off past the cut-off”, it “is a knife/ turned in on itself.” Stanza four glances aside, in homage to immaculate whiteness. But the death-resonance sounds increasingly as the poem develops. The swan becomes an ominous sign, “like a specked cough” (note the spitty alliteration of “expect” and “specked”). It’s hard at this point not to think of the terminally sick, expectorating Keats. The figure of the tubercular poet, like the swan, attracts false romanticism.
Readers of Strix will have the advantage of comparing Why the swan with the neighbouring poem, Towpath (tinnitus). The latter, earthier and more subjective, focuses on a “strange singing” that wrests the poet’s descriptive powers into inventive analogy. The sound is “Like singing / backwards. Like whistling inside croaking” and later becomes “a whistle stretched / to a fine scream”. There’s no swan on the canal in this poem, although other birds are noted, but perhaps it’s the unnerving, unidentifiable (and possibly internally produced) singing heard in Towpath (tinnitus) that forms the background music, and the impetus, of Why the swan.
The poet’s visually trained eye brilliantly connect the bird’s shape with listening and hearing. When the swan sleeps, with its head buried in the feathers of its back, the outline resembles that of a large ear. But the resemblance involves simultaneous denial. This particular swan or its image “isn’t / drawn like an ear”, a statement underlining the bird’s essential distance from the human species, and possibly the pathos of superhuman sensory awareness combined with the inability to interpret the noise of threat.
Offstage, out of the picture, some seeming drama occurs. “It … won’t look up in time. It’s as if it’s stuck.” Stanzas eight and nine begin with the ominous noise of sirens and their “shushing” and silencing by collusive air, and end with the drab rawness of “what’s left of the swan”.
The final couplet defines “what’s left” not as physical remains, but as “song”. This isn’t a comfortingly aesthetic return to tradition: the song is equated with something mundane and industrial, “the long stretch between locks”. That “long stretch” may consist of the canal’s water, the towpath, or life itself; the “locks” may be the kind that enable passage, or frustrate it. The phrase reminds us of the Orlando Gibbons lyrics, in which death has “unlocked” the swan’s throat. Inevitably, “stretched” suggests Baudelaire’s caged swan, escaped and lost in a Parisian street, desperately straining its neck towards the sky.
Lambeth’s poem, as the bird’s latest wounded incarnation, earns an honourable place in the later pages of our swan anthology, as an elusive emblem appropriate to the place and time.
• Why the swan is one of the two poems by Andrew Lambeth published in Issue #5 of Strix.
