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.”

Form

“Leda and the Swan” is a sonnet, a traditional fourteen-line poem in iambic pentameter. The structure of this sonnet is Petrarchan with a clear separation between the first eight lines (the “octave”) and the final six (the “sestet”), the dividing line being the moment of ejaculation—the “shudder in the loins.” The rhyme scheme of the sonnet is ABAB CDCD EFGEFG.

Commentary

Like “The Second Coming,” “Leda and the Swan” describes a moment that represented a change of era in Yeats’s historical model of gyres, which he offers in A Vision, his mystical theory of the universe. But where “The Second Coming” represents (in Yeats’s conception) the end of modern history, “Leda and the Swan” represents something like its beginning; as Yeats understands it, the “history” of Leda is that, raped by the god Zeus in the form of a swan, she laid eggs, which hatched into Clytemnestra and Helen and the war-gods Castor and Polydeuces—and thereby brought about the Trojan War (“The broken wall, the burning roof and tower, / And Agamemnon dead”). The details of the story of the Trojan War are quite elaborate: briefly, the Greek Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, was kidnapped by the Trojans, so the Greeks besieged the city of Troy; after the war, Clytemnestra, the wife of the Greek leader Agamemnon, had her husband murdered. Here, however, it is important to know only the war’s lasting impact: it brought about the end of the ancient mythological era and the birth of modern history.

Also like “The Second Coming,” “Leda and the Swan” is valuable more for its powerful and evocative language—which manages to imagine vividly such a bizarre phenomenon as a girl’s rape by a massive swan—than for its place in Yeats’s occult history of the world. As an aesthetic experience, the sonnet is remarkable; Yeats combines words indicating powerful action (sudden blow, beating, staggering, beating, shudder, mastered, burning, mastered) with adjectives and descriptive words that indicate Leda’s weakness and helplessness (caressed, helpless, terrified, vague, loosening), thus in

The Swan

Symbol Analysis

The swan in this poem isn't the kind of swan you can throw crackers to at your local pond. This swan came down to earth from Mount Olympus with a mission. That's right, the swan is really the Greek god Zeus in disguise. As the poem progresses, we catch only glimpses of the bird's swan-like features. He simply moves too fast and has too much single-minded focus for us to pin him down. Accordingly, the poem contains lots of synecdoche, where a part of the bird is used to represent the whole. Also, despite being a god, Yeats chooses to highlight the swan's instinct and animal nature.

Line 1: The poem opens with an image of the swan descending on Leda. His "great wings" are the first thing described.

Lines 3-4: The "dark webs" refers to the swan's webbed feet by only the webbed part, an example of synecdoche. He grabs her neck with his bill and presses himself against her chest.

Line 6: The phrase "feathered glory" is probably a metaphor to describe the swan's genitals. (A "glory" is something associated with gods or the divine.)

Line 12: Another synecdoche: the poem makes reference to the swan by one of his parts, the "brute blood" in his veins. To complicate things, the phrase "brute blood of the air" has another meaning as a metaphor – as if the air were a living thing with its own blood.

Line 14: OK, one more synecdoche. The "indifferent beak" really refers to the indifference of Zeus-as-swan. A part of the bird is used to describe the whole. The beak is personified as having a human emotion.

Sex

Symbol Analysis

"Leda and the Swan" is essentially a depiction of a violent sexual encounter between a woman and a bird. If you find yourself sympathetic to the Ancient Greek perspective, you might think that the encounter is a divine and mystical experience. If you find yourself approaching the poem from a more modern perspective, you might be horrified. The poem caters to both viewpoints. Yeats's language seems to imply that the swan is violent and uncaring but also mysterious and seductive.

Line 4: Leda's "breast" is personified as "helpless." In fact, Leda is the helpless one.

Lines 5-6: Again, Leda's fingers can't be "terrified"; only Leda can be terrified. It's a classic example of personification of an inhuman object.

Line 9: Yeats provides an image for the moment of sex: the swan's (or possibly Leda's, as Yeats didn't use a pronoun here) "loins" or thighs "shudder."

Ancient Greece

Symbol Analysis

Yeats believed that history moved between different and contrary cycles. "Leda and the Swan" seems to be set at the exact turning point between two such cycles. Leda's world is populated by myths and divinities that come down to earth. But the world to which she gives "birth" is ruled by politics and power, not the gods. The Burning of Troy set the stage for the future rise of the Roman Empire and, much later, the rise of modern Europe.

Title: The title of the poem alludes to an Ancient Greek myth and also to the many representations of this myth in Western art that share this title.

Lines 10-11: These lines contain the poem's most direct allusion to Greek history. They describe the Burning of Troy and subsequent murder of Agamemnon, the most powerful Greek commander in the Trojan War. The poem claims that the birth of Helen of Troy, Leda's child by the swan, led to these events.

Line 13: For most of the poem, the swan has been portrayed simply as a powerful bird. But here we learn that the swan has the "knowledge" of a god: Zeus.

Leda and the Swan Theme of Sex

Yeats wrote a number of poems about sex and specifically the mysterious connection between our spiritual and animal natures. Sex is a problematic subject in "Leda and the Swan" because the word "rape" brings up issues of violence and gender inequality that the modern reader can't ignore. For example, why does Yeats write a poem about an act of violence but make it sound so seductive? At the same time, you could interpret Leda's rape by Zeus symbolically as a violent but mystical encounter that brings a person to another level of reality. Yeats would have taken Zeus as a symbol for pagan divinity, or even of nature in general. And the Greeks would have found the idea that the gods were obliged to follow human rules to be absurd.

Questions About Sex

Why does Zeus commit the rape while disguised? How does this particular animal change our perspective on the encounter?

Does Yeats pay enough attention to the ethical issues associated with the rape?

Does the poem imply that Leda may not have been completely opposed to the rape? If so, do you find this offensive?

Why does Yeats spend so much of the poem describing the sexual act if the consequences of the act were more important to history?