Leda and Swan

Summary

  • In this poem, W.B. Yeats narrates the story of Leda when she was raped by the god Zeus in the form of a swan. The first stanza opens with Zeus, in swan form, attacking and subduing Leda so he can mate with her. The second stanza focuses on the actual act of their mating and the violence of it, and the third and final stanza focuses on the act of Leda getting pregnant.
  • Yeats suggests that through mating with a god, Leda is able to have a vision of the future and sees the horrible fate that will befall Clytemnestra, the daughter she has just conceived with Zeus before he "indifferently" lets her go.
  • The speaker retells a story from Greek mythology, the rape of the girl Leda by the god Zeus, who had assumed the form of a swan. Leda felt a sudden blow, with the “great wings” of the swan still beating above her. Her thighs were caressed by “the dark webs,” and the nape of her neck was caught in his bill; he held “her helpless breast upon his breast.” How, the speaker asks, could Leda’s “terrified vague fingers” push The feathered glory of the swan from between her thighs? And how could her body help but feel “the strange heart beating where it lies”? A shudder in the loins engenders “The broken wall, the burning roof and tower, and Agamemnon dead.” The speaker wonders whether Leda, caught up by the swan and “mastered by the brute blood of the air,” assumed his knowledge, as well as his power “Before the indifferent beak, could let her drop.”

Literary Elements

Themes

Major themes in “Leda and Swan” are - rape, violence, sexual desire, and free will. Although this is a historical event that Yeats has put into his poem.

%%Relationship between Art and Politics%%

  • Yeats was devoutly committed to the Free State movement in its dealing with an oppressive British government, us was equally committed to bringing independence about through legal and political systems rather than violence. The violent rape by an oppressive Zeus over a helpless mortal speaks for itself when understood in these thematic terms, but the poet was so rigid in his application of symbolic meaning and the necessity to come equipped with prior knowledge of mythological and historical associations allusions that it can be very easy to completely miss how this political theme can be applied.

%%Sex and Violence%%

  • "Leda and the Swan" depicts an act of rape. The poem’s graphic imagery leaves no doubt that Zeus, in the form of a swan, violently assaults Leda. At the same time, however, the poem seems to revel in sensuality even as it lays bare the brutality of Leda’s rape and its equally brutal consequence—the Trojan War. The poem neither condemns nor approves of Leda’s rape, but seeks instead to capture the complexity of the moment in light of its enormous mythological significance.
  • The poem’s description of Leda’s reaction to her rape then culminates in the end of the sexual act, which results in impregnation: “A shudder in the loins engenders there / The broken wall, the burning roof, and tower.” Here the poem’s scope opens up dramatically, from Leda’s body to the wider world, moving abruptly from the rape itself to its consequences—that is, the eventual fall of Troy.
  • the poem reveals its real concerns: not with the rape itself, but with what that rape will achieve on a mythological scale. This moment also thus offers what is perhaps the poem’s clearest take on sex and violence: that violence begets more violence, which is emphasized by the callous way Zeus treats Leda at the end of her rape, when his “indifferent beak” simply “let[s] her drop.”

%%History and Trasformation%%

  • The significant moment of the poem is of course Zeus’s rape of Leda, which, according to myth, led to the Trojan War and the Golden Age of Greece—a modern age of art, literature, and democracy. The poem treats this significant moment between Leda and Zeus as a mythological and historical tipping point.
  • Many readers have interpreted the poem as an allusion to the colonial relationship between Great Britain and Ireland, and more specifically to the Irish War for Independence. In this reading, Zeus represents not just the powerful forces of fate and history but the colonial power of England, which fully conquered Ireland in the 1500s, leading to famine, oppression, and violence—a kind of metaphorical rape, in the poem’s terms.
  • Thus, just as Zeus’s rape “engenders” the rise of the Greek Golden Age, the English domination of Ireland eventually gave rise to Irish independence. This could not take place without violence, however, which the poem also vividly reflects.
  • Yeats famously believed that history was a series of interlocking and repeating patterns—he thought of them as “gyres,” which spiraled toward significant moments that triggered the immense change.

Symbols

%%The Swan%%

  • The swan in "Leda and the Swan" is no ordinary bird. It is actually the Greek god Zeus, king of the Olympian gods, who has transformed himself into the form of a swan in order to impregnate Leda.
  • As befits his godly position, Zeus is the power player in the poem, his attack setting into motion Leda's pregnancy, the birth of Helen, and the war that leads to the fall of Troy and rise of modern Greek history. But rather than referring explicitly to Zeus the god, Yeats consistently depicts him in his symbolic swan form, which highlights his animalistic nature as he relies on violence and violation in order to achieve his ends.
  • Accordingly, the swan has been interpreted as a symbol for many things besides the god Zeus himself. Drawing parallels between Zeus's rape of Leda and the Christian Annunciation, some have read the swan as symbolic of God or the Holy Spirit, whose child conceived upon the Virgin Mary, Jesus Christ, changes the path of history.
  • Others have interpreted the swan as a symbol for England, the colonial power that dominated Yeats's native country of Ireland for centuries. Regardless, in its broadest meaning, the swan can be understood as symbolic of fate, destiny, history, or change—any of the powerful forces that impact human lives.

%%Leda%%

  • Yeats himself drew comparisons between Leda and the Virgin Mary, both of whom were human women who conceived babies by divine power and bore children who grew up to alter history and usher in new eras of transformation.
  • Leda has also been read as symbolic of the country of Ireland, colonized by its more-powerful neighbor, England.

%%The Trojan War%%

  • Though the poem contains no explicit mention of Troy or the Trojan War, the individual images of the "broken wall, the burning roof and tower / And Agamemnon dead" are obvious references to this cataclysmic event in Greek mythology.
  • reference to the Trojan War can also be understood as a larger symbol of history and transformation. Yeats believed that history was composed of a series of cycles and that it was possible to identify the turning points that triggered each new and transformative era. Every era, in other words, has its own Trojan War; and "Leda and the Swan" has often been read as symbolic of the dawn of Christianity and the Irish Civil War, with "the broken wall, the burning roof and tower / And Agamemnon dead" coming to represent the cataclysmic violence necessary for each era to achieve transformation.

Poetic Devices

  • Form-- Petrarchan Sonnet

    The poem is divided into 3 stanzas; the first two stanzas of the poem contain four lines, but the third stanza has seven lines.

  • Meter-- iambic pentameter

  • Rhyme Scheme-- ABABCDCD EFGEFG

  • Speaker-- the action in the poem is from the third-person subjective point of view.

  • Metaphor and Similies-- The term breast is used as a metaphor to represent the feelings the woman has.

  • Alliteration and Assonance--

    1. The repetitive /h/ and /b/ sounds in the final line, "He holds her helpless breast upon his breast," helps to emphasize the firm grasp that Zeus has on Leda. Just like he has dominated her.
    2. the alliterative link between "body" and "beating."
    3. /b/ sounds in "broken" and "burning"—tying together the separate images that make up the fall of Troy, and linking them to the "brute blood".

  • Allusions-- One of the main allusions in the poem is the idea that the swan raped the young woman. This is alluded to through the description of the woman and through the description of her fear.

  • Metonymy and Synecdoche-- The term feather is used as a general term to make reference to the lack of regret the swan felt when abusing the young woman.

  • Personification-- the line "her helpless breast".

  • Hyperbole- the line "so mastered by the brute blood of the air"

  • Enjambment-- In lines 1-4

  • Caesura- in the line “A sudden blow: the great wings beating still…“