17 pages • 34 minutes read
John HollanderSwan and Shadow
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1966A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Form and Meter
The poem is written in a structured form intended to replicate the shape of a swan floating on water and its reflection. Thus, the line lengths vary from one word to 15 words. The space between words and phrases varies because of the poem’s visual structure. The poem is written in free verse and does not follow regular meter. Its musicality comes from the absence of punctuation (with words flowing into each other), lyrical language, repetition, call-and-response, and internal and occasional rhyme. For example, consider the lines: “soon Yet by then a swan will have / gone Yes out of mind into what / vast / pale / hush / of a / place / past” (Lines 25-32). Here, “vast” rhymes with “past,” and there is alliteration in “pale,” “place,” and “past.” Other examples of alliteration occur with the repeated “wh” sound in “What A pale signal will appear / When Soon before its shadow fades / Where Here in this pool of opened eye” (Lines 10-12), and the stressed “r” sound in the phrase “ripples of recognition” (Line 16).
Personification and Metaphor
The speaker first compares the swan to “a pale signal” (Line 10), or a beacon. In literary terms, this is a kind of chremamorphism, where an animate subject (person or animal) is given the characteristic of an object. Having established the swan as an object, the speaker now animates it, in an example of personification: “this object bares its image awakening / ripples of recognition that will / brush darkness up into light” (Lines 15-17). In these lines, not only does the image “awaken” memory (ripples of recognition), the memory itself will “brush” (fuse, turn) dark into light.
The personification is also simultaneously a metaphor because the swan is compared to a pale signal implicitly. In a larger sense, the swan is a metaphor for “the perfect sad instant now / already passing out of sight” (Lines 18-19), or the present moment.
Imagery
The poem’s imagery conjures up a swan and its reflection passing out of sight on a dusk-lit pool. Using the contrast between light and dark, the effects of light on water, the swan’s image reflected in the eye and in the water, and the half-lit hour of dusk, Hollander creates imagery that is both immediate and evocative.
The vocabulary often involves darkness and light, such as the time of “[d]usk” (Line 1) or twilight, which itself is half-dark and half-lit. The flies are “gray” (Line 8), thus providing a backdrop that will enhance the “pale signal” (Line 10) of the swan. The swan takes “shape in the dark air” (Line 14), and the speaker’s recognition of this helps “brush darkness up into light” (Line 17). In the second half of the poem, the swan’s image is either light on water or water in light. The swan disappears into a “vast / pale / hush” (Lines 27-29), leaving behind a “sudden dark” (Line 33).
Along with this visual imagery, the poem uses auditory imagery. Before the swan’s arrival, the “loud / flies” (Lines 4-5) hover over the water. After the swan leaves, the place is a “pale / hush” (Lines 28-29), “as / if a swan / sang” (Lines 33-35).
