No Swan So Fine: a close reading

No Swan So Fine

“No water so still as the
  dead fountains of Versailles.” No swan,
with swart blind look askance
and gondoliering legs, so fine
  as the chintz china one with fawn-
brown eyes and toothed gold
collar on to show whose bird it was. 

Lodged in the Louis Fifteenth
  candelabrum-tree of cockscomb-
tinted buttons, dahlias,
sea-urchins, and everlastings,
  it perches on the branching foam
of polished sculptured
flowers — at ease and tall. The king is dead. 

— Marianne Moore

The great modernist poet Marianne Moore is one of the most interesting characters in American literature. A devout Presbyterian and fearsomely bold experimentalist, she spent many claustrophobic years living with caring for her ailing mother, but also held the New York poetry scene in such sway that she was invariably referred to as Miss Moore. Her poems are dazzlingly precise, written in rigorous syllabics, and often featuring phrases from elsewhere which she would save in her notebooks.

The great novelist Henry James once wrote to a young man who had asked him for advice on being a writer: ‘Try to be one of those people upon whom nothing is lost’. Marianne Moore, in a very different register from James, was somebody who noticed things. She’s a poet of strangeness, or at least of cultivated unfamiliarity. Her poems are full of small, or exotic, foreign, or dead animals, or inanimate animals, and she wrote them in syllabic patterns that protect by obscuring, like a cage made of twigs, the throbbing emotion within them.

Syllabics is a system whereby each line has a given number of syllables, with no patterning of the stresses. It’s not exactly a metre, since it doesn’t have an inherent rhythm, so it is easy not to notice when you’re reading a poem written in it. In this case, the lines have differing numbers of syllables, but they repeat in a pattern; the two stanzas match. This use of different line lengths was a popular device in the 17th century particularly. The lines here run: 7, 8, 6, 8, 8, 5, 9, and lines two and five in each, very unobtrusively, rhyme.

This mysterious poem, ‘No Swan So Fine’ begins with an unattributed quote, which shares its first word with the title: ‘No water so still as the/ dead fountains of Versailles’. The poet has chosen to include quotation marks, but not the source of the quote. It sits like the voice of authority, from outside the poet, like a statement in a guidebook or similar. It proclaims a which spreads to cover the whole of Versailles, which was once a busy, bustling place and is now just a museum.

The Palace of Versailles, built by Louis VIV of France, was world-famous for its opulence. It was huge, and filled with the most extravagant works of art. Its gardens, with their water fountains — at a time when intricate formal gardens were considered one of the most sophisticated ways to show off wealth and culture — were legendary. The life of Versailles ended with the French Revolution, in which Louis XVI and his Queen, Marie Antoinette, were executed. Nowadays, and when Moore wrote the poem, the whole place is a tourist site.

The ‘guidebook’ continues, ‘No swan… so fine’ — but instead of telling us about the china swan, it first tells us about the less-fine, living one: ‘with swart blind look askance/ and gondoliering legs’. With these two details that swan becomes alive, because to invoke in a poem is to conjure it as if by magic. He’s not ‘fine’. His black eyes are aslant (which, as well as describing the eyes of a swan, sounds a bit like ‘askant’), and his legs are ‘gondoliering’. With this brilliant, black-and-white, diagonal image, the living swan is fully conjured.

This is a short poem, only two stanzas. The rest of the first one is taken up with the china swan. Chintz china is the kind that’s completely covered with an all-over flowered pattern, like the famous glazed cotton from India. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the heyday of Versailles, Indian textiles were the most sought-after and finest in the world. So this china will have been made with superlative skill and attention to detail, in the most up-to-date and also most extravagant style conceivable, to satisfy a king who had it all and still wanted more. The swan (remember the swan) ‘perches on the branching foam/ of…/ flowers’ which are growing out of the china. The swan is also covered with little flowers. We see it has ‘fawn-/brown eyes’, and that’s all we’re shown aside from a ‘toothed gold collar’, that ‘shows whose bird it was’. A china bird doesn’t need a collar at all, because it can never go away. This one wears a ‘toothed’ collar — as in a trap, or maybe a crown? — in declaration of possession that far outstrips any need.

Also in Stanza 2 we learn that it lodges in a candelabrum which is itself an ornate riot of ‘polished sculptured’ representations of hothouse and garden flowers, very cultivated blooms.

So this is a poem reality and artifice (or ‘life and art’), and about ownership.

This candelabrum belonged to Louis XV (the grandfather of Louis XVI): king at 13, married at 15, and a father of ten children by the age of 30, mostly famous for his profligacy with money and for his mistresses.

And then that last line, with its sudden punch at the end.

The king who collected this artefact is dead. The two later kings who gave life to Versailles are also dead; one of them was beheaded by his people and was the last French king.

So it’s a poem reality and artifice (or ‘life and art’), ownership, and death. Or rather, deadness, not-aliveness. About the difference between the two. Normally the phrase ‘The King is dead’ is met with the response, ‘Long live the King!’ But that refers to the new king, and in this case, that can’t be, because the end of Versailles was marked by the death of the last king. Louis XV was very alive during his life: he was scores of mistresses and two who are almost more famous than he is: one was Mme de Pompadour and the other Mme du Barry. A great patron of culture and the arts, he was a vast collector, and it’s said that his nonchalance about money ultimately caused the French Revolution. So he is almost the last of the Ancien Regime, and he’s the one who set France on its decisive route, precisely by collecting things like this candelabrum.

It’s a very noticeable feature of Moore’s syllabics that she often hyphenates whatever word is at the end of the line, often brutally. But, as poetry is written deliberately, it’s important to remember that these hyphenated words were chosen to be at the ends of the lines; she isn’t just hyphenating whatever word happens to get in the way. In this poem, the words are fawn-brown, and cockscomb-tinted, leaving us with ‘fawn-’ at the end of one line — as if to accentuate the innocence and sentimental beauty of the swan, just before the detail of the collar — and ‘cockscomb’ at the end of another. Here, of course, we have a game, because although a cock’s comb is a part of an animal, a cockscomb is also a vain, strutting man, And this word that means a form of vanity is being applied to a simple, unassuming little flower, a ‘button’. This word carries a lot of weight in the poem, I feel. And each of these words, in this sparsely rhyming poem, is a rhyme word.

But what’s the last thing we learn about the swan? It perches ‘at ease and tall. The king is dead. So he is dead (along with the beautiful awkward swart-eyed swan), and the opulent china swan, at its ease, holding its head high, still exists — unalive as it is, here it is.

The simulacrum outlives the genuine. But at the cost of being unreal.

This poem, characteristically, originates in two newspaper articles. This fact is incidental to the reading of the poem, but it’s interesting nonetheless. In 1930 an article appeared in the Illustrated London News announcing an auction at Christie’s, including a pair of candelabra. Miss Moore sketched them. She later wrote to her brother, in a very different tone of voice from that of the poem: ‘Lord Balfour had a pair o' these candelabra which were sold last year at Christie's with his other things. Each swan has a gold saw-toothed collar and chain and both feet are planted on a tree’.

A year or so later, the gardens at Versailles were being renovated. An article by Percy Philip in the New York Times Magazine, expressed the idea that the statues seemed to be protesting against the dullness of the place, without the court in attendance. Moore cut this piece out too, and in the top margin she hand-wrote the caption from the photograph: "There is no water so still as the dead fountain of Versailles."

Join my close reading series for six weekly lunch-hour sessions, where we read one poem each time and talk abut it in great detail — starting on 3 June. Details are here.

‘No Swan so Fine’ was first published in POETRY magazine in Chicago in 1932.