Leda and the Swan Summary 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 Ledas 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 ejaculationthe 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 Yeatss historical model of gyres, which he offers in A Vision, his mystical theory of the universe. But where The Second Coming represents (in Yeatss 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 Polydeucesand 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 wars 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 languagewhich manages to imagine vividly such a bizarre phenomenon as a girls rape by a massive swanthan for its place in Yeatss 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 Ledas weakness and helplessness (caressed, helpless, terrified, vague, loosening), thus increasing the sensory impact of the poem.
