Poem of the Week 2024/39

Swan, tell me your old story.

What country have you come from, swan, what shores are you flying to?

Where do you rest at night, and what are you looking for?

It's dawn, swan, wake up, soar to the air, follow me!

There is a land not governed by sadness and doubt, where the fear of death is unknown.

Spring forests bloom there and the wind is sweet with the flower He-Is-Myself.

The bee of the heart dives into it and wants no other joy.

– Kabir, translated by Czesław Miłosz and Robert Hass

Swans are such strangely resonant birds; they seem to be taken up culturally, wherever they live, as symbols of something larger than a mere part of the local fauna, though what they symbolize varies widely: grace, death (the swan song), beauty, royalty, wisdom . . . in this poem, the mystic Kabir addresses a swan, which seems here to be a conglomerate of all the meanings projected onto the bird – that is, it represents the grace & beauty of the world. The poet reaches out to the swan, acknowledging its mysterious life, a life separate from the poet's understanding: tell me your story. But not just your story: your old story, suggesting an attempt to hear the universal & historical history of not just this individual swan, but this swan as a representative of all swans, an archetype of the species, a long-lasting co-inhabitant of the earth. The swan, this beacon of grace & beauty, seems to be restless & rootless: where have you come from, where are you going, where do you rest, what do you seek? (Is there an easy place on earth for such beauty?)

Halfway through the poem, it takes a turn: the poet exhorts the swan to wake up, it's dawn (a general symbol of rebirth, new hope, new possibilities). Then, strangely, he adjures this water bird to leave its native element rise up into the air. Even more oddly, the poet further tells the bird to follow him – the mystic is already soaring into the empyrean. The suggestion is that the swan, this representative of what is gorgeous & graceful in the world, should join with the poet in the land he mentions, a place very unlike our earth, as it is not governed by sadness & doubt & fear & death. After telling us what this land is not, the poet tells us what the land is, & again he conjures up a sense of serene beauty by using the beautiful things of earth (what else do we have to compare things to?): not a bird such as the swan, this time, but springtime forests (spring, like dawn, is a symbol of revival & hope), blooms, sweet breezes carrying the scent of a flower – not an earthly flower, but a symbol of union with the divine (He seems to refer to God, & He-Is-Myself to union with God – though perhaps He is the flower, & the poet has become one with Nature, in the form of a flower).

To further suggest the on-going & active nature of this ecstatic union, the poet's heart has, or is, a bee (another lovely, useful creature, producing sweet honey & making nature fruitful through pollination) that – in an exuberant, active verb – dives into the flower. There's a sexual undercurrent to this ecstatic union, as there often is in poetry describing a mystic union with a deity. But though we are left with this final image of ecstatic union, has the poet truly achieved this celestial bliss? If he has, why is he calling on the swan, a figure of the beauties of this earth, to join him? Is he still longing for earthly beauty? Or is the poet rather calling on the beauties of the earth to purge themselves of doubt, sadness, fear, & death, & join him in seeking the transcendence of this ineffable joy?

I took this poem from The Enlightened Heart: An Anthology of Sacred Poetry, edited by Stephen Mitchell. Unlike many anthologies of spiritual verse, this one eschews the poetry of doubt as well as of dogma, & concentrates on poetic attempts to capture & celebrate the soul's union with the divine.