Close Reading: Leda and the Swan - W. B. Yeats

Leda and the Swan

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

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?

WB Yates

Leda and the swan is a daring sonnet by Irish poet William Butler Yates that retells the story from Greek mythology of Leda,s impregnation  by the god Zeus in the form of a swan. Yates wrote this sonnet at the height of his career in 1928; the same year he won the Nobel Prize for literature. As you can see, the poem is violent and sexually explicit, but with all the lyricism and complexity that we expect from Yates. This is a poem about a single event, but it also speaks more widely as it places this event as part of a larger scheme. Yates believed that history functioned in cycles of roughly 200 years. The result of this rape is the birth of Helen of Troy, and the fall of Greek civilization. In my opinion, Yates, along with Eliot, is one of the most gifted and technically exceptional poets of the 20th century, and Leda and the Swan has been considered one of the most technically masterful poems of all time.

Those that read my last close reading of Keats, will have spotted that this is once again a sonnet, and one of the Petrarchan tradition. The poem uses the traditional fourteen line sonnet form, but with a radical, modernist style. He achieves this through a series of bizarre images, and abstract descriptions in terse language that both describe the immediate physical event, whilst equally being able to offer a distanced view of the occurrence in the passing of time. The sonnet is true to the traditional metre of iambic pentameter, but uses a Shakespearean rhyme scheme for the first two quatrains (abab cdcd), and then reverts to the rhyme scheme of the Petrarchan tradition for the sestet (efgefg). It is interesting that the subject of the sonnet couldn't be further from the sonnet tradition. Most sonnets are about love or public matters, but this sonnet is about violent rape, and that contradiction of form is echoed in the poem by the richness of the poem's oppositional  juxtapositions. Another example of this, is the way in which Yates is using a very precise and tightly controlled form to communicate a situation of high intensity and power. An act of force and violence described through a medium of order and control. The iambic pentameter moves the poem along in in a steady, pulsating way, but is injected with certain offbeat phrases such as, "And Agamemnon dead". The only break from the traditional structure of the sonnet happens at the line break in the sestet, "and Agamemnon dead/ being so caught up". That single break in the traditional structure has a strong impact on the reader and emphasises the sudden end of the rape.

The poem's title is pretty straight forward, and there isn't much to say about it, but what I do think is worth pointing out is that the title is the only indicator of the characters in the poem as they are not mentioned in the body. Yeats makes the assumption that the reader is familiar with the myth, because there is no mention of Zeus's name at all; the reader is expected to know the myth and understand that the swan is an incarnation of the all-powerful Greek god.

The poem opens with a simple yet striking phrase; "a sudden blow" referring to the physical act of sexual penetration. The punctuation breaking the line isolates the phrase and powerfully emphasizes the explosive violence of the act. It is an incredibly strong opening which immediately shocks us. The line picks back up with the very striking description of the swan hanging in the air above Leda. The words "beating still" hold dual meaning as the wings are both continuing to beat, but also remain still in the air making it a rather interesting oxymoron. As we move into the second line, we get a glimpse of the girl's physical, and perhaps psychological, state as she is "staggering" under her assailant. There is then an interesting contrast of imagery in the enjambment between lines 2 and 3; "her thighs caressed" has an almost tender and romantic connotation, but is followed immediately by that grotesque image of the "dark webs" that are the swan's feet. It is interesting to point out that the poem never directly mentions the swan; its presence is only expressed through images like "great wings"and "dark webs".  The quatrain ends with the girl caught helplessly in the swan's beak and crushed by the bird's body; an image that is reinforced by the repetition "breast upon his breast".

The second quatrain of the octave presents the reader two rhetorical questions that extend the description of the rape. These highlight the powerless nature of the girl under the swan's subjugation. Yeats describes her fingers as "terrified"  and "vague". This literary technique is known as  synechdoche and is when you refer to a part to signify the whole; this poem is littered with examples. Here the synechdoche highlights her inability to resist the swan's "feathered glory", which is of course his penis. Then in the second rhetorical question: "And how can body, laid in that white rush,/But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?" she is no longer referred to as even "girl", but has become merely "body" laying in the "white rush", which is both the bird's feathers, and is punning on the image of ejaculation. She feels the pulsating of "the strange heart beating" which again could be a reference to his penis. The imagery of the bird uses an effective combination of both abstract and concrete descriptors that emphasize its divine and incomprehensible nature. This stanza also presents Leda's physical and psychological state with skillful compression and interconnectedness in the references of "terrified" fingers and "loosening thighs".

In the final sestet, the poem moves away from describing the rape to its effect; a shift from an immediate physical description of the present, to an abstract dramatisation of the future. Yeats takes a step back from the present to situate the significance of the moment in the larger pattern of history. 

That significance all hinges on that "shudder in the loins" at the beginning of line 9 as the swan's orgasm, and ejaculation, becomes the catalyst to a startling series of events. The act of rape in the earlier stanzas seemingly trigger "The broken wall, the burning roof and tower/ And Agamemnon dead"  this line connects together the sexual connotations of the breaking of the female hymen, and the phallic symbol of the tower, with imagery describing the fall of Troy (Agamemmon dies at the conclusion of the Trojan war). This is because the result of the union between Leda and the swan is the birth of Helen, and thus starts a series of events that culminates in the siege and fall of Troy marking the collapse of Greek civilization, and the ushering in of the modern age. 

The Burning of Troy

Line 11 is the only line that breaks the tradition of the sonnet form by breaking it in half. After that break, the speaker changes to past tense and ends the poem with another question. The use of past tense is used to distance us from the act and see it in terms of a greater historical significance.  He asks if, as Leda is so savagely ravaged by the "brute blood of the air",  she received some kind of divine knowledge of the significance of the event from Zeus, whose divinity suggests he must be aware of it.  The description of Zeus as "brute blood of the air" identifies him as a cosmic force; a being that is physical, animal and divine. The poem closes with the swan, post-orgasm, carelessly and indifferently dropping Leda from its beak with the question over her awareness unanswered.

I particularly enjoy the way in which Yeats uses language in this poem. Constricted by a narrow, tightly ordered structure, he uses each word in a careful and considered way to achieve its maximum effect. There is a fantastically crafted mixture of abstract and concrete language, which  conveys a sense of the immediacy of the rape, as well as a greater cosmic significance. The poem's diction is extremely simple, and yet, the imagery created from it is vigorous and startling. It is a measure of the poet's talent that he manages to communicate extremely complex ideas about the ushering in of a new era in very few words.

There is much more that can be written about this poem. I have not mentioned how it can be read in the context of the Irish Civil War, nor how it fits in to Yeats' "Annunciation" poems. That I will leave to you to do more research. I hope to have shown how some of the best poetry can be both simple and complex. It engages the reader before they even scratch the surface of the poem's meaning.