Blog #7 - Dec. 28, 2014

Juliette, the Swan

Sonnet For a White Swan

She befriended me, I so lacking in grace,

Though out of her watery field she too, ungainly

Mounted the dew-covered hill to receive my embrace.

Approaching with snow-white breast bared willingly,

Muttering low her sounds of deep content,

As I held her close and ever so lightly stroked

Her long and lithesome shape with her consent.

A godlike dispensation here evoked,

A joy forever in the heart enshrined,

Beyond all words this investiture of love,

An eternal moment’s harmony entwined,

Blessed by some winged archetype above.

Transcendent was the honour of her stay,

A gift divine to divinise our clay.

It was during the years of Mary Helen's battle with ovarian cancer that we first met Juliette, the Swan. She lived in a lake about half a kilometre from Nora Lake where our house and Mother's Garden is situated. I don't know why she came that first time, for me it is a sublime mystery. At the lower lake she was simply an ornament to be admired.

One day she flew above and around the trees from the lower lake to our lake and came to the edge of the lake. I saw her and walked over towards her. She was the picture of grace. I spoke softly to her and after awhile she swam further into the lake. My memory is a bit vague as to when she actually climbed our hill on seeing me near the house. It may have only been a day or two since our fist visit. I had some corn that we feed to the mallard ducks who slept on our patio near my office door where they knew they were safe and could sleep during the afternoon. I took a handful of corn and we approached each other, Juliette contentedly eating from my hand. Now our bond was fully established and she would soon be visiting regularly.

There is perhaps no more beautiful sight on a lake than to see the graceful gliding of a swan through water.

Sri Aurobindo gives us only one line about a swan in Savitri but it is so magnificent!

"A slow swan silvering the azure lake,"

He does write of the swan, however, in His "Letters ton Yoga.

The Swan is the Indian symbol of the individual soul, the central being, the divine part which is turned towards the Divine, descending from there and ascending to it.

"The swan is the liberated soul,"

The Swan is a symbol of the soul on the higher plane.

From The Future Poetry Sri Aurobindo mentions the swan in "Beyond the Silence" in His "Poems in Quantitative Metres