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Notes and Background on "The Black Swan"

James Merrill in Army Uniform (1946)

James Merrill in Army Uniform (1946)

“The Black Swan” was written after the nineteen-year old Merrill returned to Amherst College in 1945 after serving in the army for eight months. He first published the poem in his college’s literary magazine Medusa (Fall 1945), which Merrill coedited with William Buford.

The cover design of a black swan in a pool that reflects its image, surrounded by twenty-six circles, is by Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika (1904-94), an Athenian friend of Kimon Friar.

The term black swan derives from Juvenal’s Satire 6.165 in which something resembles: "rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno” ("a rare bird in the lands, very much like a black swan"). 

"Fourth dimension": P. D. Ouspensky popularized the concept of a timeless fourth dimension in works such as Tertium Organum (1912; trans. 1922).

"A thing in itself": A philosophical concept that contrasts a thing in itself to a thing as it appears to an observer.

"The blond child": Merrill wrote to William Burford on August 1, 1946: "what I wanted more than anything is [sic] the world was the inconceivable joys of 'the blond and blue-eyed', the bliss of the commonplace. . . .'" In his reference to the "blond" and the "commonplace," Merrill appears to be alluding to Thomas Mann's story "Tonio Kröger." See the description of Merrill's letters to Burford in the Amherst College Archive.

In James Merrill: Life and Art (NY: Knopf, 2015), Langdon Hammer records Merrill at 18 reacting to a letter from a nephew who describes being left alone in a rowboat drifting toward some swans. Merrill wrote to his mother that the story "makes me so homesick for not Southampton but for being a child again, being in a position to experience the fear and magical delight of the little boy caught among the big white, beautifully evil birds . . ." (Hammer, 86).

See the"Possible Sources" link in the left margin for other allusions. In addition to Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Valéry, there were many other French poets who exploited the homophone of "cynge" (swan) and "signe" (sign) in their poems and influenced English poets such as W. B. Yeats and T. Sturge Moore. Merrill would also have known of the Black Swan of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. The ballet’s doubling of the sisters, as white and black swans, seems relevant to the black and white reflected swans of the poem. 

"The Black Swan"
Notes and Background on "The Black Swan"