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Leda And The Swan
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?
Poem:
Leda and the Swan.
Extracted from: http://www.uv.es/fores/poesia/ledaswan.html
The poem that we are going to analyse is Leda and the Swan, written
by William Butler Yeats, published in the radical
newspaper To-morrow in 1923 and rewritten and
published in 1928 in The Towe. The poem structured
in three stanzas, the first and the second stanza have four verses each,
and the third stanza has seven verses.
In this poem, Yeats speaks
about the Greek myth of Leda and Zeus. Zeus wanted Leda, married with Tindarus,
king of Sparta. To possess her, Zeus became into a swan, and Leda had two
pairs of rwins: Castor and Pollux, and Helena and Clitemnestra. Different versions of
the myth make us doubt about the disposition of Leda towards Zeus, and Yeats
plays with this situation, with the beahovior of Leda.
In the first stanza,
the author, who is not implicated, is just an observer, describes how the
swan, Zeus, is prepared to attack: he open his wings, gets closer to a hesitant
Leda and touches her (A sudden blow: the great wings beating still /Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed,
verses 1 and 2). Yeats describes a doubtful and helpless girl who has nothing
to do with the almighty swan (He holds her helpless breast upon his breast,
verse 4).
Yeats persists in describing
the helpless situation of Leda in the second stanza. She cannot do anything
(How can those terrified vague fingers push /The feathered glory from
her loosening thighs?,verses 5 and 6). The situation of Leda turns into
sumission: she has nothing to do, Yeats tell us, so she feels what the swan
makes her feel(And how can body, laid in that white rush,/But feel the
strange heart beating where it lies?, verses 7 and 8).
In the third stanza the
author exposes the surrender of Leda and the consummation, i. e., the victory
of Zeus the swan, as we can see in the wall and the roof (The broken
wall, the burning roof and tower, verse 10).
When William B. Yeats
wrote this poem, it was, in his own words a meditation about “Ireland and
international politics".
Ireland and thw whole world had suffered
a war, an invasion, the war in Ireland and the First World War were recent,
and Leda and the Swan speaks aboute the invasion of Zeus to conquer
Leda. Zeus makes strategies, he transforms into a swan to make Leda surrender.
He is like a captain with his army, trying to find the weak points of the
enemy (in the poem is the chastity and te faithfulness of Leda) and attack.
And that is what Zeus does.
We could connect this
poem with one of the most important parts in the life of Yeats: his relationship
with Maude Gonne. Yeats met Maude Gonne, a young heiress in 1889. She admired
his poetry and he was obsessed with her, but she never accepted to marry
him. This fact has an special importance in the Poetry of Yeats, and we
can see that influence in this poem. Here Yeats wants to be the swan, he
wants to to transform into anybody else to conquer Maud. He is the swan and
Maud is Leda. He wants to make a strategy to invade Maud and conquer her.
We must remember, too, that this poem was written in the last years of Yeats.
Maybe he is regreting for not doing everything to be with Maude.
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Bibliography.
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Uv.es/fores/poesia
http://www.uv.es/fores/poesia/ledaswan.html
05.04.2006
Editor: Vicente Forés
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Gustavo Negrín.
Leda y el cisne, traducción y prólogo. http://www.saltana.org/1/docar/0237.html 05.04.2006
ü
Cristina Arnau. 2nd of
Bachillerato’s Greek Lessons. 2002-2003
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Wikipedia.org http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Butler_Yeats
06.04.2006
Wikipedia