"Leda and the Swan": a poem by W B Yeats

W B Yeats’s poem “Leda and the Swan” was published in his 1928 collection “The Tower”, although the poem itself is dated 1923, the year in which he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. It is therefore a poem written at the height of his powers (he was 58 in 1923) and belongs to the period when he was exploring the occult and attempting to explain national and world events within a mystical and symbolic context.

However, this particular poem is something of a throwback in that mysticism is far less apparent than symbolism.

It takes as its theme the mythological story of how Helen of Troy was conceived when her mother, the wife of Tyndareos, the King of Sparta, was raped by Zeus in the form of a huge swan. The first mention of this legend is in the play “Helen” written by Euripedes and first produced in 412 BC. Helen describes how: “Zeus took the likeness of a swan, then flew to my mother’s lap to escape from a pursuing eagle and thus had his crafty way with her”. The story continues by telling how Leda then laid an egg from which Helen was hatched. She grew up to be the most beautiful woman in the world and the unwitting cause of the Trojan War.

Yeats’s poem takes the form of a Petrarchan sonnet, although the “rules” are not strictly applied. For example, the use of a new rhyme scheme for the second group of four lines (c-d-c-d to follow a-b-a-b) is more typical of the Shakespearean form. Yeats sticks with the Petrarchan tradition of the “turn” in the ninth line (which is where the octet gives way to the sestet of the concluding six lines) which is where the poem moves typically from “argument” to “resolution”. However, Yeats has a few tricks up his sleeve in this regard.

There is a marble relief in the British Museum that dates from the 3rd century BC and depicts the rape in exactly the way that Yeats describes. The words match the image so closely that it is hard to imagine that Yeats had not seen either the relief or a reproduction of it. The first eight lines of the poem describe and then question:

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?

The image of the swan grasping Leda by the nape of the neck is exactly as shown in the relief, as is the caressing of her thighs by the swan’s webbed feet. However, the second quatrain goes beyond the physical image to ask two rhetorical questions. The first implies that Leda has no choice but to submit, but the second seems to suggest that she might not be completely unwilling. The swan has a heart to which Leda might be offering some sort of emotional response. If Yeats was indeed inspired by the British Museum relief, he might well have wondered if Leda’s fingers, hidden from view, were not in fact aiding rather than resisting the act that was being forced on her.

The “turn” in the ninth line and beyond moves suddenly from the act to its consequence, taking the reader from the rape straight to the fall of Troy, which happens after ten years of war occasioned by the kidnapping of Helen by Paris once she has grown from an egg into a beautiful woman. There is therefore a gap of a number of years between the “shudder” and the “broken wall”, but only a handful of words.

It is also interesting to note that the traditional move from argument to resolution is reversed by Yeats, in that it is at this point that the argument really begins.

The sestet of the sonnet is as follows:

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?

Yeats employs an interesting device in the eleventh line by breaking it into two pieces, writing the second half on a fresh line below where it might be expected. This conveys a sense of violence that is consistent with what has gone before, but it also provides yet another “turn” that the reader could not have anticipated.

The poem ends with another rhetorical, unanswered question, although an answer is clearly implied. Greek mythology is full of cases in which parents possess knowledge of what their children will do or suffer, from the moment they are born. Quite often this knowledge is given to them by a god, either directly or via an oracle, and their reaction is either to protect the child, as with Achilles being dipped in the River Styx to make him (supposedly) immune to injury, or to push the problem away by leaving the child on a mountainside (from where, almost inevitably, it is rescued and lives to fulfil the original prophesy!).

Yeats therefore teases the reader with the conjecture that Leda’s relationship with Zeus was more than just that of a victim of rape. Is this Zeus’s way of imparting knowledge to her? Can the reader assume that she knows exactly who this giant swan is and that his actions have a function beyond that of committing a violent sexual offence? Yeats may even be drawing a parallel between Leda and the Virgin Mary, in the Christian story, in that being impregnated by a god imparts knowledge of future events that are of profound significance.

With this poem, Yeats is doing more than just retelling a piece of Greek mythology. There is considerable symbolism here that relates to his world-view that history consists of a series of interacting and repeating events in which everything has an impact on everything else. Nothing exists in isolation and new things are created by the bringing together of opposites. At the time this poem was being written a new Ireland was being created from the chaos that had gone before, and Yeats, as a member of the first Irish Senate, was part of the process of building a new country. The idea that violence can beget knowledge was therefore one that was highly relevant to Yeats, and which found expression very neatly through “Leda and the Swan”.