"Leda and the Swan" is a sonnet by William Butler Yeats.
Leda and the Swan[]
Leda and the Swan. Engraving by Louis Garreau after Jan Verkolye. Licensed under Creative Commons, courtesy Wellcome Foundation & Wikimedia Commons.
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
About[]
Leda and the Swan" was originally published in The Dial in 1924.
It was included in Yeats's 1924 collection, The Cat and the Moon, and certain poems,[1] and reprinted in his 1928 collection, The Tower.
Combining psychological realism with a mystic vision, the poem describes the rape of Leda, in which Zeus came to Leda in the form of a swan. As the story goes, Zeus took the form of a swan and raped or seduced Leda on the same night she slept with her husband King Tyndareus.
Understanding Leda and the Swan
According to later Greek mythology, Leda bore Helen and Polydeuces, children of Zeus, while at the same time bearing Castor and Clytemnestra, children of her husband Tyndareus, the King of Sparta. In some versions, she laid 2 eggs from which Zeus's children hatched. (The idea that the semen of more than one male might influence pregnancy, a feature in the origin myth of Theseus, is called telegony; it retained scientific followers until the late 19nth century.) In the Yeats version, it is subtly suggested that Clytemnestra, although being the daughter of Tyndareus, has somehow been traumatised by what the swan has done to her mother (see below).
Yeats's poem is regularly praised as a masterpiece.[2] Camille Paglia called the sonnet "the greatest poem of the twentieth century," and said "all human beings, like Leda, are caught up moment by moment in the 'white rush' of experience. For Yeats, the only salvation is the shapeliness and stillness of art."[3]
See also[]
Leda and the Swan by William Butler Yeats
References[]
- ↑ The Cat and the Moon and Certain Poems, Reading Library. Web, Jan. 2, 2019.
- ↑ Bloom, Harold (1972). Yeats. Oxford UP. pp. 363–66. ISBN 9780195016031. http://books.google.com/books?id=vqpspMiPWLgC&pg=PA363.
- ↑ Paglia, Camille (2006). Break, Blow, Burn. Random House. pp. 114–18. ISBN 9780375725395. http://books.google.com/books?id=lNZ_LYCGSPsC&pg=PA114.
External links[]
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This poem is in the public domain