The Ugly Duckling

On a warm summer’s day, a mother duck sat on her nest in the reeds at the edge of a farmyard pond, waiting for her eggs to hatch. One by one the shells cracked open, and small, bright yellow ducklings peeped and paddled out into the sunshine, until only the very last egg was left. It was larger than the others, and when it finally hatched, out came a duckling that was grey, and big, and awkward, and did not look like his brothers and sisters at all.

The other ducks in the farmyard took one look at the grey duckling and decided they did not like him. The hens pecked at him, the ducks nipped him, and even his own brothers and sisters said they wished he would waddle off and never come back. His mother tried to be kind, but even she sometimes sighed and wished he looked more like the others. By the end of that first day, the duckling understood that he was not wanted, and he ran away from the farmyard as fast as his webbed feet could carry him.

Alone

He wandered through marshes and meadows, and everywhere he went it was the same. The wild ducks called him ugly. A pair of geese were shot by hunters right beside him, and he lay very still in the reeds all night, too frightened to move. An old woman took him in for a while, hoping he might lay eggs, but her cat and her hen mocked him for not knowing how to purr or cluck, and he slipped out the door one grey morning and went on alone.

Autumn came, and then a hard winter. The pond where he swam froze a little more each night, until one evening the ice closed in around him and held him fast, and a passing farmer had to break the ice with his boot to carry the exhausted duckling home. The farmer’s children wanted to play with him, and in his fright at the fuss and the noise he knocked over the milk pail and flew into the flour barrel, and the whole house ran after him waving their arms, and he escaped out the door and back into the cold, and lived through the rest of that long winter as best he could, half frozen, in the reeds.

Spring

When spring finally came and the sun began to warm the marsh again, the duckling found that his wings, so long unused, could suddenly lift him properly into the air for the first time. He flew until he came to a wide garden with a lake in it, and on the lake, gliding without a single splash, were three of the most beautiful birds he had ever seen: swans, white as snow, with long graceful necks.

Something in the duckling ached to be near them, even though he was certain they would peck him and drive him off the way everyone always had. He swam toward them anyway, his head bowed low, ready to be chased away, because he thought it would be better to be killed by such beautiful creatures than to go on living the life he had. But instead of driving him off, the swans swam to meet him.

The reflection

The duckling bowed his head to the water, expecting to see the same grey, awkward reflection he had always seen, and bracing himself for whatever came next. But the bird looking back up at him from the still water was not grey, or awkward, or ugly at all. It was a swan: white, and graceful, and long necked, just like the others gliding beside him.

Some children ran down to the water’s edge, throwing bread and calling out that the new swan was the most beautiful of them all, more beautiful even than the others who had been born there. The swan who had once been an ugly duckling tucked his head under his wing, hardly able to believe it, and thought that when he was small and grey, he could never have dreamed of so much happiness, and that it was worth every hard, lonely day to arrive, finally, exactly where he was always meant to be.

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Bornholm Lullaby

Play this softly while you read The Ugly Duckling aloud: a traditional lullaby from Bornholm, the small Danish island in the Baltic Sea.

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