“The Swan Song” in Galaktion's Poetry

Abstract

The motif of the swan song and its symbolism in Galaktion's poetry is inspired by Akaki's verse. Akaki's “divine” hymns evoke a sense of the sacred and the sublime – a state of exalted inspiration. Alon­gside these “divine” hymns, Akaki also refers to the swan song, defining it as the song sung before death, which conveys the feeling of life's end and the proximity of death. Galaktion absorbed Akaki's poetic worldview from his earliest years. The dying swan's song, found in the poem “Me and the Night,” expresses precisely this sense of death and directly echoes the symbolic experience of the threshold so vividly portrayed in Akaki's poems.