yeats critical essay leda

Leda and the Swan Summary & Study Guide includes comprehensive information and analysis to help you understand the book. This study guide contains the following sections: This detailed literature summary also contains Bibliography on Leda and the Swan by William Butler Yeats. William Butler Yeats's daring sonnet describing the details of a story from Greek mythology—the rape of Leda by the god Zeus in the form of a swan—was written at the height of the poet's career, the same year he received the Nobel Prize for literature. Leda and the Swan is a violent, sexually explicit poem that has all of the lyricism and complexity of Yeats's later work, with its plain diction, rhythmic vigor, and allusions to mystical ideas about the universe, the relationship of human and divine, and the cycles of history. It can be seen as a poem about the way a single event is to be understood as part of a larger scheme; the result of the god's assault on Leda is the birth of Helen of Troy, the subsequent destruction of early Greek civilization, and the beginning of the modern era. It has also been suggested that the poem, which was first written (and later revised in this present form) during the Irish Civil War of 1922-1923, is intended to draw attention to the violence that beset Yeats's homeland during that time. Leda and the Swan has been considered one of the most technically masterful poems ever written in English. In the work, Yeats uses the fourteen lines of the traditional sonnet form in a radical, modernist style. He calls up a series of unforgettable, bizarre images of an immediate physical event using abstract descriptions in terse language, while at the same time offering a distanced view of that occurrence in the sweep of time. Yeats himself considered the poem one of his major accomplishments, and in addition to praising its economy of language and skillful use of rhythm.
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Notes by William Fairbairn Mythical Background behind the ‘Ledean Body’ Interested (and keen) students will, no doubt, dash off to read ‘The Iliad’ to brush up on the full background to Yeats’ superb poem. If you have less time, but a keen interest, you may also enjoy Madeline Miller’s 2012 novel The Song of Achilles – this has recently been shortlisted for the Orange Prize and tells the story of ‘The Iliad’ from the point of view of Achilles’ lover Patroclus.  In the key Greek myth which inspired Yeats’ poem, Leda is seduced by Zeus – who visits her in the guise of a swan. Their union produces three eggs. One doesn’t hatch – which could be representing metaphorical destruction, or a potent force yet to come (cross reference ‘The Second Coming’); one produces two (demi-god) children: Helen and Pollux – these are assumed to be the children of Zeus; and the last egg produces two (mortal) children – assumed to be the children of Leda’s mortal husband King Tyndareus: Castor and Clytemnestra. Pollux and Castor, although born from separate eggs, are often considered – and referenced as – twins, including in their representation as the constellation Gemini. Castor is mortally injured in battle, and Pollux, a demi-god, petitioned his father Zeus to share his divinity with his brother; Zeus agreed as so both brothers were granted a form of immortality as the constellation Gemini. Clytemnestra marries Agamemnon (brother of King Meneleus – married to Helen; Helen of course runs off with Paris to Troy: this is the event which ‘gives birth’ to the Trojan War). Clytemnestra kills Meneleus when he returns from the Trojan war along with his concubine Cassandra (cursed prophetess sister to Paris/Troilus/Hector etc – all are the children of Priam). This is partly on the basis that Agamemnon killed her daughter as a sacrifice to the gods so that there would be wind for the Greek armies.
A sudden hit from above, and the swan’s wings beat above the girl. His webbed feet caress her thighs, and he catches her in the nape of his neck. Her fingers cannot push his feather from her thighs. A shudder in his loins impregnates her and foreshadows the burning wall and Agamemnon’s death. The speaker asks her whether she accessed his knowledge as well as his power before he let her drop.AnalysisThis is the most famous poem in the collection, and its most intense and immediate in terms of imagery. The myth of Leda and the Swan is a familiar one from Classical mythology. Zeus fell in love with a mortal, Leda the Trojan queen, and raped her while taking on the form of a swan to protect his identity. She became pregnant with Helen of Troy. That Helen was part goddess helps to explain how her beauty brought about the destruction of two civilizations. Despite its ABAB rhyme scheme, the poem maintains a breathlessness that is partially due to enjambment, a poetic technique that Yeats uses liberally in this collection.The impregnation in this poem has many layers. There is the physical impregnation of the girl with a daughter, but also the sense that her womb holds the blueprint for the entire Trojan War. Therefore even the rape takes on a sort of inevitability, similar to the events that the still unborn Helen will cause.
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Get this SparkNote to go! “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 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.