Anonymous has written many wonderful poems. Indeed, anonymous is possibly our greatest poet. I’m reading my way for the second time through The Rattle Bag, an anthology of poems collected by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, and anonymous has more poems than anybody else and some of the best poems.

Anonymous like Homer is not one person but many. The first version of a poem emerges from an anonymous somewhere and then passes through hundreds of voices, arriving eventually at a version that somebody prints, fixes like a dead butterfly. But there may be many printed versions, and if like the Iliad and Odyssey the poem merits translation then many more versions emerge in multiple languages.

The Silver Swan is thought to have emerged around 1600 and may refer to the death of Edmund Spencer. This is all speculation, but certainly Orlando Gibbons set the poem to music.

Why, I wonder, did the silver swan have no note? Spencer had many notes. With my enthusiasm for death, I like that it was death that “unlocked her silent throat” and led to her one song. But it’s the last two lines I like especially, and surely “More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise.” And if it was true in 1600 it’s even truer now.

The Silver Swan by Anonymous

The silver swan who living had no note.
When death approached unlocked her silent throat;
Leaning her breast against the reedy shore,
Thus sang her first and last, and sung no more:
“Farewell all joys! O death come close mine eyes,
More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise.”