Swan/human, caught in mid-transformation

In Greek myth Cyncnus, King of the Ligurians, was in love with Phaeton. Phaeton was the annoying young man who asked his father, the sun-god Helios (but it’s Apollo in some versions), for proof that he was his father’s spon and that his father loved him.

So Helios agreed to give his son anything he asked. Phaeton asked to drive the chariot iof the sun. Helios warned him that he wasn’t strong enough to control the team of wild horses that lead the sun through the sky. But Phaeton insisted, and Helios could not go back on his promise. 

Of course Helios was right. Phaeton lost control of the horses, and the sun followed the chariot so close to earth that it burned crops, birds, animals and people. Eventually Zeus had to put an end to the disaster by knocking the chariot out of the sky with a thunderbolt. Phaeton was immediately killed.

But his lover, Cyncnus, was inconsolable. He sat by the lake near his palace, day after day, staring into the water, thinking of the young man he’d loved and lost.

Eventually Apollo took pity on Cyncnus and turned him into a swan. Not an intelligent, speaking swan like the children of Lir, but one who had forgotten all human concerns and loves, and who was aware of no future and no past, and lived only in the moment.  

Flying united! No silver bondage here! (Ok, I explain the bondage reference below.)

But there’s something about swans. They have a habit of turning into people, and people have a habit of turning into swans. And people have a habit of falling in love/lust with swans, and swans have a habit of falling in love/lust with humans. And their identity is often confused: is that person who looks like a human really a swan in disguise? Is that swan really a person? 

Many of the swan-human stories are erotic. The reason (maybe) is in the fact that swans combine both male and female characteristics in one body. The white body (or black) symbolises the purity of women, and its rounded contours are female. However, the long neck is male-phallic: reminiscent of the penis. And, of course, male swans actually do have a penis.  

If we move from the classical story of Leda and the Swan, and look at Celtic sources, one of the earliest surviving tales of human-swan beings is of the Children of Lir.

The Children of Lir

King Lir is the same guy as Shakespeare’s King Lear, though Shakespeare’s version leaves out the swans and the magical transformations. In fact Lir’s correct name is Lear, but in English he’s usually called Lir to distinguish him from from the Shakespeare version.

Anyway, Lir marries Aoibh, which is the Celtic spelling for Eve. Celtic spelling was invented by foreign monks, and is utterly stupid. I say this as a Celt. From here I’m going to call her Eve.

Lir and Eve have four children: Fionnuala (Fenella), and the boys Aodh (pronounced Eh, and probably a version of the name Hugh), Fiacra and Conn. But Eve, beautiful and universally loved, dies.

So Lir marries Aoife (more like Eva), and she’s jealous of the memory of Eve, still so widely loved. So she turned Lir and Eve’s children into swans.

They spend 900 years in swan form, able to speak and sing beautifully, but stuck in swan form. Finally, they are freed to return to human form by the prophesied marriage of two people who we won’t worry about here. However, because they’re 900 years old, they die.

There are various Christian versions of the story, with them being freed by a monk, or by the tolling of a church bell, but those bits were added later to save the story from being excised entirely, by the new Christian overloads. 

One significant thing about this story is that the four of them were bound together by silver chains, for that 900 years. It was the breaking of the chains at that wedding that allowed them to transform back.

But 900 years is a long time to spend in bondage, and all the safety manuals advise against it.

For a really good poem about The Children of Lir, conveying something of the sadness and isolation of those four swan-children, children even at 900-0dd years old, and about to die, clickmy earlier post, here.

I chose a poem a poem by a friend of WB Yeats, Katharine Tynan. It was one of his favourite of her poems. You can find it that post, which I’ve linked to here. 

There are many poems based on the Children of Lir legend, which I discuss here.

There’s one by Yeats’s friend “AE”, but it followed a later version of the story, and I’m not going to use it. 

This is from Twenty-One Poems by Katharione Tynan, selected by WB Yeats. So it’s not Yeats, but there is a Yeats connection. It’s an image of their last days as swans, shortly before they transform back to human form and die. 

THE CHILDREN OF LIR

Out upon the sand-dunes thrive the coarse long grasses;
Herons standing knee-deep in the brackish pool;
Overhead the sunset fire and flame amasses
And the moon to eastward rises pale and cool.
Rose and green around her, silver-gray and pearly,

Chequered with the black rooks flying home to bed;
For, to wake at daybreak, birds must couch them early:
And the day’s a long one since the dawn was red.

The children transforming into swans

On the chilly lakelet, in that pleasant gloaming,
See the sad swans sailing: they shall have no rest:
Never a voice to greet them save the bittern’s booming
Where the ghostly sallows sway against the West.
‘Sister,’ saith the gray swan, ‘Sister, I am weary,’
Turning to the white swan wet, despairing eyes;
‘O’ she saith, ‘my young one! O’ she saith, ‘my dearie !’
Casts her wings about him with a storm of cries.

Woe for Lir’s sweet children whom their vile stepmother
Glamoured with her witch-spells for a thousand years;
Died their father raving, on his throne another,
Blind before the end came from the burning tears.
Long the swans have wandered over lake and river;
Gone is all the glory of the race of Lir:
Gone and long forgotten like a dream of fever:
But the swans remember the sweet days that were.

Hugh, the black and white swan with the beauteous feathers,
Fiachra, the black swan with the emerald breast,
Conn, the youngest, dearest, sheltered in all weathers,
Him his snow-white sister loves the tenderest.
These her mother gave her as she lay a-dying;

To her faithful keeping; faithful hath she been,
With her wings spread o’er them when the tempest’s crying,
And her songs so hopeful when the sky’s serene.

The silver chain that binds them

Other swans have nests made ‘mid the reeds and rushes,
Lined with downy feathers where the cygnets sleep
Dreaming, if a bird dreams, till the daylight blushes,
Then they sail out swiftly on the current deep.
With the proud swan-father, tall, and strong, and stately,
And the mild swan-mother, grave with household cares,
All well-born and comely, all rejoicing greatly:
Full of honest pleasure is a life like theirs.

But alas ! for my swans with the human nature,
Sick with human longings, starved for human ties,
With their hearts all human cramped to a bird’s stature.
And the human weeping in the bird’s soft eyes.
Never shall my swans build nests in some green river,
Never fly to Southward in the autumn gray,
Rear no tender children, love no mates for ever;
Robbed alike of bird’s joys and of man’s are they.

From 1901: half woman, half swan

Babbles Conn the youngest, ‘Sister, I remember
At my father’s palace how I went in silk,
Ate the juicy deer-flesh roasted from the ember,
Drank from golden goblets my child’s draught of milk.

Once I rode a-hunting, laughed to see the hurry,
Shouted at the ball-play, on the lake did row;
You had for your beauty gauds that shone so rarely.’
‘Peace’ saith Fionnuala, ‘that was long ago.’

‘Sister,’ saith Fiachra, ‘well do I remember
How the flaming torches lit the banquet-hall,
And the fire leapt skyward in the mid-December,
And among the rushes slept our staghounds tall.
By our father’s right hand you sat shyly gazing,
Smiling half and sighing, with your eyes a-glow,
As the bards sang loudly all your beauty praising. ‘
‘Peace,’ saith Fionnuala, ‘that was long ago.’

‘Sister,’ then saith Hugh ‘most do I remember
One I called my brother, one, earth’s goodliest man,
Strong as forest oaks are where the wild vines clamber,
First at feast or hunting, in the battle’s van.
Angus, you were handsome, wise, and true, and tender,
Loved by every comrade, feared by every foe:
Low, low, lies your beauty, all forgot your splendour.’
‘Peace,’ saith Fionnuala, ‘that was long ago.’

The children suddenly ageing, back in human form

Dews are in the clear air and the roselight paling;
Over sands and sedges shines the evening   star;

And the moon’s disc lonely high in heaven is sailing;
Silvered all the spear-heads of the rushes are.
Housed warm are all things as the night grows colder,
Water-fowl and sky-fowl dreamless in the nest;
But the swans go drifting, drooping wing and shoulder
Cleaving the still water where the fishes rest.

This is going to be a series, about the weird sexual mythology surrounding swans and humans. There’s the swans in Swan Lake, who finally take on human female form. 

But the most famous shape-shifting swans are male. They include Zeus, with Leda, and Gottfried, brother of Elsa von Brabant, who in swan form carries Lohengrin, knight of the Grail, from Montsalvat in Northern Spain to one of the rivers that passes through Brabant in what is now Belgium. (Frankreich, back then.) That’s an epic journey for a river-based creature, and someone should write an opera about it. 

One interesting thing about swans is that they have penises, unlike most birds.

Anyway, with the help of my lovely model, and Amazing Special Effects, my Sinful Sundays are going to be taken up for a while with stories and poems about the whole human-swan connection.

Take it away, Mr Yeats!

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
                    Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?