Swan Song

The belief that swans sing at the moment of death was already proverbial in ancient Greece by the 3rd century BCE. Aeschylus alluded to it in Agamemnon (458 BCE), and Plato had Socrates invoke it in Phaedo. The phrase passed through Chaucer and Shakespeare, but the modern figurative sense — a final creative act — solidified in the 18th century. Samuel Taylor Coleridge gave the idiom its wry modern edge with his 1799 epigram mocking poets who perform before they are ready.