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Musical Accompaniment (11.4 MB - May take a while to load)

The Swan of Tuonela, Opus 22

By Jean Sibelius (Download MP3)

 

The Swan

 

I sit and remember

The lights dimmed,

The swan watching from behind.

 

My thoughts now chain me to my own desk,

Trying to stop thinking

I shouldn't think - it slows time from its already painful crawl.

 

I don't want to stop though.

The pen drags me with it,

Even throwing me ahead of it

And the swan, in all its grace,

Watches from behind .

 

I count a hundred seconds

One hundred seconds, alone and quiet

The lights dimmed to glowing embers.

It takes an eternity.

 

I look around me, at the books and papers of my day,

Lying in the piles of uselessness that pollute the room.

It's nothing but busy work.

All of it.

A distraction; a senseless waste of time.

Waiting for someone.

 

I sit alone and remember

How I came home, leaving behind

My old self,

My old sadness

And bring bringing back with me a new one.

 

The weight of it never leaves.

I felt it, just a while ago

Coming upstairs, sitting down,

Picking up the pen.

 

My pen, it has a life of its own

Ink flows from it on its own accord.

Or is it on mine?

My own thoughts interrupt my thinking.

A shrieking, whistling, steaming mess emerges from the depths

Flows, seeping and black, down my arm

Onto the paper..

...Moves the pen...

 

...And the swan haunts me from nowhere...

 

I check my back. I search the room.

There is nothing.

What felt so real for a brief moment

Is vanished. The swan is only a stare

To be felt on the back of my neck.

Forever?

Perhaps.

 

I feel its stalking gaze again.

I start, turn,

It recoils into its corner behind my door.

I sigh, gather myself, close the door to see her better.

 

The floor becomes like water,

The corner a cave,

And the beauty emerging from it

More than this world deserves to know.

Its white is clean

Untouched, however shaken the poor thing may be

With black, darker than the empty void I've come to know

Placed perfectly, so delicately around her beak, about her eye.

She approaches me slowly, hesitant, curious,

Then nuzzles my cheek

And rests on my lap, her head nestled into my chest.

I use my sleeve to gently, so gently stroke her feathers

I'm afraid to dirty them with my hand.

I'd like to stay here forever, with the swan.

 

It's warm here. Not one word needs to be spoken.

Quiet. Not a wind, not one moving thing,

But the heartbeat of the swan,

Listening to mine.

The light was never bright, only a warm ember in the distance.

An eternal sunset, motionless and comforting.

 

I count a thousand seconds.

One thousand warm, wonderful seconds

They fly by too quickly.

I see the autumn leaves appearing on the dirt around me

And on the swan's pool of water.

An icy winds hits.

The swan stirs, wakes, looks around

At the snow, already forming fast around us and on us.

She looks at me

Nuzzles my cheek once more

And flies away, as the eternal sunset sheds nights upon me.

 

Her pond turns to ice.

 

I watch her disappear,

And see her white replaced by a snow memory

Her black stays in the trees around me -

Twisted. Sick. Dead and dying.

All of them.

The wind whistles through the trees, screams its fury at my presence

And throws a curtain of snow around me.

 

It bites my face

My cheek burns with cold where it once felt warmth.

I stand up, fight it,

But fall to my knees and cover my face.

A tear freezes in my eye

And the darkness envelops me.

 

I feel the light of my lamp, approaching in the distance.

 

I wake up at my desk

A poem lies in front of me.

I'll never read it.

And soon, I have begun again.

 

I sit alone in my room,

 

The lights dimmed to a warm glow

 

And remember you,

 

My swan.

Happy Valentines Day, Chantelle!

I miss you very much.

-Elliot.

P.S. You may have noticed that this poem lacks a specific poetic form. There's a reason for that (see below).

The Encrypted Message

 

*Note - The musical selection on this page is what I was listening to while writing this. The title is 'Swan of Tuonela, Opus 22". Also, the final line has 2 syllables. Because of this, the number 2 will be used several times. Now, some of the numbers might not be exact, but it can be a little hard to count every syllable, so please bear with me because I did try get this as right as possible... Carrying on....

Yes. The number 2 will be used a few times throughout this, as will several numbers that we'll get by counting lines and syllables and blah blah blah.

First use of the 2 - If you count the number of syllables in the entire poem, you should get about 840 (that's what I got). Subtract 2 from the second digit of this number (4). Do that twice (reducing the 4 to a 0). You now have the number 800.

Add the digits of 800 (8+0+0=8).

Write that down. 8.

Now we use the 2 again. Add 2 to the 8. You get 10 (of course).

Now find the average number of lines per paragraph (or stanza, or whatever they call them). I got 4 lines per stanza.

Add the 4 to the 10, making 14.

Write that down too. ( 8/14).

Now it gets a little more complicated...

We just got a 14. Go to the 14th stanza. There are 6 lines in this stanza, containing in them a total of 66 syllables. So 6 will be an important number here, especially in its relationship to the number 2.

6/2=3 , 6+2=8 . There. Now we have some more numbers to work with.

Now to build a confusing, and almost random number, using 3s, 6s, and 8s. First, put down three 3's. Then a decimal. Then an 8, followed by six more 3s. ( 333.8333333).

Multiply that number by 6. You get 2003. Write that down.

( 8 / 14 / 2003 )

Pretty neat how that fits in there, eh? It took a while, but the end justifies the means in this case.

This marks the sixth month since we last saw each other. Sigh. I miss you.

Again, Happy Valentines Day,

-Elliot.