Why Mallarme’s The Swan is more important than ever

By Aarshi Majumder

As a sonnet, Le Cygne or The Swan is an enigma. Not only is it difficult to translate it from the original French, but it also serves as a different aperture to different readers, creating a variety of secret, fluid emotion. At the outset, one may claim that it is due to its linguistic impenetrability (what with its complex rhyme scheme) that it emerges to be just as thematically confounding. But for what it’s worth, reading any form of poetry itself is a challenge. Reading literature, just as writing it, is a constant process of excavation — both within and without. We look at a poem, and turn it over and over through time; each instant outlining a renewed facet in our being. We are never the same person after reading something. And the insights we gain from it may not always be the kind we may have known about ourselves.

I believe that The Swan is such a poem. If you haven’t read it, it could be best described as something uncomfortable, unnerving, frightening. Too real. Out of Baudelaire and Verlaine and the other greats, I always find myself returning to the cynosure of this fragile bird. As a student at university who constantly feels that she is never good enough; or falling behind her other peers, perhaps I too am Mallarme’s little swan, trapped in ‘the forgotten hard lake whose frost’s haunted beneath’. There’s probably a feather of that struggling frozen swan inside all of us, stuck like a broken quill. The lakes in our minds remain washed over in the sheen of winter, as we feel incertitude looming at its banks.

 A common question which may bewilder us is: ‘What are you going to do in the future?’ A friend the other day shared with me her anxieties of not getting a job after graduation. Frankly speaking, we aren’t from really well-off backgrounds, and it took a lot for us to get to where we are now. It’s a brutal world out there, which will ‘tear us up in a drunken wingbeat’; a world where only the fittest survive. Nevertheless, I told her that everything will work out in the end. Call it toxic positivity or a blind Panglossian worldview, but it is due to the uncertainties of the future that we can be filled with purpose; to be who we choose to become. Things are at rock-bottom: that is why it can only get better from there. And I have Mallarme to thank for this: ‘A swan from past days remembers it’s he / ‘Magnificent though who without hope breaks free / ‘For not having sung the domain to be’. Our past childlike wonder can imbue our seemingly jaded present. Having hope against hope to not perish with a swansong in a life we do not want is the beginning of our real potential.

Yet I often find myself regretting my decision to come to university at all. The dark sibilant shadows of student debt, job scarcity and increasing living costs whisper as though it foretells inevitable doom. Once in conversation with my classmate, she made the interesting point that we, as brown students in the UK, must constantly prove ourselves that we are worthy of being here and be better than our other peers. But, if there’s anything that I’ve learnt so far from personal experience, it would have to be that problems and solutions in life go hand in hand: failures and successes are like the changing crests of a wave. The ‘horror of the earth’ may stifle us for a time with no way out, but Mallarme reminds us that they don’t define us or our capacities as whole human beings. Our lives are enclosed within amorphous circles of self-doubt and self-satisfaction, at times merging with or polarizing from each other. Coming to university was a risk I chose to make to fulfil my dream. I believe this is what makes pursuing our own identities so fascinating, rather than losing ourselves in ‘the transparent glacier of flights never made!’.

In the final short stanza, there arises an image of another swan ‘immobilized in the cold dream of slights’. This makes me think of those sleepless nights we perhaps have all spent crippled with anxiety, imagining what could go wrong in our futures. What if I don’t get my dream job? How am I going to graduate with a first at this rate? What’s going to happen to me? Maybe, we aren’t asking ourselves the right questions. A ‘what now?’ makes more impact than a ‘what if?’.

The little swan who’s entrapped in the ‘pure gleam bonds’ of a futile self-exile probably forgets that it has wings to fly upward. We too possess our own wings, though we may not know it yet due to the fears that we harbour within. We too can fly, if we choose to simply ascend into the world with courage.

Illustration: Atharva Kamboj