ABSTRACT
To make death a way of life, alas, is not always convincing. It is to contrive that those who suffer an early death are “gently weaned from their earthly life, like a child that outgrows/the soft breasts of her mother”. In “The Swan,” the gentleness of dying is accomplished in the displacement of the hells of death onto a beautiful swan whose dying becomes a fearful letting himself down into the waters which receive him gently and which as if with gladness and abating draw back beneath him wave on wave. It is not only the softness of the water that conveys the swan from life to death, and from fear to gladness, but the stanza break itself — a shade of white — silently mimics the swan’s gentle fall into the secret rhythms of death. Dying has the color of silence.
