Swan Song

This expression arises out of the Greek legend that the swan, which doesn’t actually sing, is capable of giving voice to something like a song near the end of its life. Socrates believed that the song was a joyful one because it signaled that the swan was soon to join Apollo, the god of poetry and music that it served. At the end of Homer’s epic, the father of Odysseus, Laertes, who is now an old man, dons the armor of his youth and joins his son and grandson in a swan song of last battle. The expression ‘sawn song’ has now come to be associated with the last work, or nearly final work, of a poet, composer, artist, or other creative person. It is generally seen as an attempt to sum up their resignation, serenity, triumph, or acceptance. The Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, for example, had a successful career writing symphonies and other works, but apparently produced no new compositions during the last three decades of his life until it was discovered that his ninety-second year he took up his composer’s pen one final time to orchestrate a song from Shakespeare’s ‘Twelfth Night’ entitled, “Come Away, Death.” Another example can be seen in the life of African-American dancer and actor Josephine Baker, whose performances captivated Parisian audiences in the 1920s but whose career went into decline in the following decades. In 1975, however, at the age of sixty-eight, she returned to Paris to star in a retrospective show celebrating her fifty years in the theater. The show opened to rave reviews. A week later, she died in bed from a cerebral hemorrhage with glowing newspaper reviews spread around her.

Sawn songs also show up in lives of so-called ordinary people. One beautiful example appears in Akira Kurosawa’s magnificent film ‘Ikiru.’ The protagonist is a lifeless bureaucrat who has toiled away in a meaningless existence at the Tokyo City Hall for several decades, only to discover late in life that he has terminal stomach cancer. This realization ultimately shocks him into one final redemptive act to make up for his years of shallowness and self-absorption: He helps to create a children’s playground on what was once a stagnant pond. Similarly, in the lives of our elderly relatives or friends, a swan song might be a last effort to support a worthy cause, a gift given in one’s last days, or a small act of kindness before dying. It may be that in late adulthood such simple acts serve as a way of signaling that a human being has finally achieved some sort of rapprochement with life and with death. With the great adventure of life behind them, and the mystery of the unknown before them, such swan songs may be among the most poignant and precious manifestations of human condition. ~ Pages 217/218