A swan: ‘I have looked upon these brilliant creatures, and now my heart is sore'

The Guardian

24-03-2025

This morning I learned the word 'limn'. It looked at first like a typo, and I almost ignored it. But I pressed on the letters on my phone, which caused its meaning to pop up in a little box, like a window appearing in a wall. To limn is to 'depict or describe in painting or words'.
I was drinking cold coffee in my kitchen, and preparing to write this column – my last. Because I knew that I would do the swan, a large, long-necked water bird had started gliding around my mind, so it seemed clear that the word limn looks like a swan: the tall l with the tiny flick of a dipped head, and the letters after.
It can also mean 'to suffuse with light', or outline: the full moon limned the dark river and the white feathers of a swan upon it. Limn: it comes from luminare, to make light, and illuminate, as in to illuminate, or decorate, a manuscript.
It was only much later, when I read the words 'Farewell, all joys! O Death, come close mine eyes! / More Geese than Swans now live, more Fools than Wise.', that I suspected I had written about swans in this column before. I had, in November 2022.
Recently my mother told me she was worried that in the last two years or so, I had 'lost some of my innocence'. This is the sort of thing mothers say as you are walking, perfectly innocently, to the movies, thinking of nothing but popcorn and wine. And it is the sort of thing they tend to be right about. Over the course of writing these columns, I have had a child, have lost someone important to me and have lost, then rebuilt, my sense of self. The swan song I wrote in 2022 was by a person who feels familiar, but separate, from the one that stood in my kitchen this morning.
So it is exactly right that there should be two depictions of a swan: one before, and one after. After all, the most famous swan poem, Yeats' The Wild Swans at Coole, is about this feeling of having changed between one year and another, and realising it because you see swans:
I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All's changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.
Swans, quite obliviously, sent Yeats into despair. And that is one of the very many magical things about people thinking about animals. Pick one – some will speak to you, others not, and you will know instantly – and it acts like a key or a guide. It will illuminate (limn) your own memories, otherwise doors wedged closed or opened at random, and poems, or books, or passages, or lyrics, or cartoons you once loved, or hated, or were confused by: all of these are living in your head, along with all of the animals. To think about a given animal, or insect, or the moon, or fish that sing or fish that portend doom is to remember old selves, to connect your heart to your tongue:
Her tongue will not obey her heart, nor can
Her heart inform her tongue, –the swan's
down-feather,
That stands upon the swell at full of tide,
And neither way inclines.
I have learned that people can feel so strongly about daddy long legs or Komodo dragons or a lemming that if you insult that animal in your headline, people will defend it in the comments in their hundreds. That people will write to you to tell you the story of one particular spider that inhabits one particular shower, or to admit that they, too, have always pronounced anemone incorrectly. Will send you emails about the frogs, robins, snails and slugs in their gardens or tell you the price of a beaver in Canada ($2,000).
Now, I am off to a new job. Writing these on a Monday morning, staring an animal in the eye, devouring all I can about an oyster, being paid to contemplate, for hours, the significance of an egg, has been meaningful and delightful. I hope it has been something like that for you.
Thank you for reading.
This is Helen Sullivan's last Nature of column (for now). She is writing a novel for Scribner Australia. You can still write to her, here.