Leda and the Swan by William Butler Yeats
"Leda and the Swan" is a sonnet by William Butler Yeats that explores the themes of power, fate, and the relationship between the divine and the mortal. The poem recounts the mythological event in which Zeus, in the form of a swan, violently impregnates Leda, highlighting her vulnerability and the lack of agency she possesses in the face of divine will. This act is not merely a personal tragedy but is linked to significant historical events in Greek mythology, including the birth of Helen of Troy, which ultimately led to the Trojan War.
The structure of the poem follows a Petrarchan sonnet format, comprising an octave that narrates the event and a sestet that reflects on its broader implications. Yeats's language is laden with symbolism, employing devices such as synecdoche to emphasize the contrast between Leda's frailty and Zeus's overwhelming power. The poem poses poignant questions about knowledge and fate, inviting readers to reflect on the nature of divine intervention and its impact on human existence. By placing Leda’s story in the context of his broader philosophical framework in "A Vision," Yeats seeks to connect this mythological episode to the cyclical nature of human history and the transition between ages. The poem ultimately serves as a meditation on the interplay between beauty, violence, and the inexorable march of destiny.
On this Page
Leda and the Swan by William Butler Yeats
First published: 1924, in The Cat and the Moon and Certain Poems
Type of poem: Sonnet
The Poem
“Leda and the Swan” is a sonnet that, like the Italian or Petrarchan sonnet, divides into an octave that presents a narrative and a sestet that comments on the narrative. Although the rhyme scheme of the first eight lines follows the typical Shakespearean form (abab, cdcd), the next six lines follow the expected Petrarchan (efg, efg) rhyme scheme.
The octave essentially describes the god Zeus’s forced and unannounced impregnation of Leda and her ineffectual human efforts at resisting this sudden implosion in her “loosening thighs.” The sestet’s first sentence has been called William ButlerYeats’s most brilliant sentence and even the capstone of his magnificent The Tower (1928). This line reveals the consequent engendering of the Greek Age of Homer (but Aeschylus, Euripides, and even Vergil also profit), because springing from this union of the king of the gods and the mortal woman were both Helen of Troy, who caused the Trojan War, and Clytemnestra, who slew the returning, conquering Agamemnon at the war’s end—primary themes of the Greek Age. The second sentence of the sestet poses a question not so relevant to the Greeks, who, thinking often of women as booty, rather accepted the inexorable, blind run of fate and the inevitability of tragic human destiny. The poem’s final question, however, is highly relevant to Yeats’s ultimate meaning:
Being so caught up,
The fated and tragic character of the Greek mentality, in which superhuman deities (often all too human in their emotional rages of jealousy, anger, vengeance, and lust) would sport with nearly helpless human creatures, is immediately clear and powerfully felt at the opening of the poem: “A sudden blow.” Zeus never courted Leda, never announced his coming (as, say, God told Mary through His archangel Gabriel), and never spoke a word throughout. The enormous tension is heightened by the seeming casualness of the nearly regular iambic pentameter of the first line. “Great wings” creates a midline spondee (a double-accented foot), in order to stress Zeus’s overwhelming power. Leda, as a mere mortal (and a woman), has no active role in this drama: She suffers the divine play of human destiny to be acted out through the medium of her frail body. Like the Genesis story in which the woman causes the fall from grace, this is a male-dominated myth. Yeats, with his leading rhetorical questions, however, can at the same time retain the inextricable bond between mortal beauty and its tragic passing even while he transcends the contexts of both the Greek and the Judeo-Christian myths.
Forms and Devices
The sonnet’s extreme precision allows much to be said and implied, and Yeats further compacts this poem’s terseness by using synecdoche: Only the “wings,” “webs,” and “bill” are attacking; only Leda’s “fingers,” “nape,” and “thighs” are resisting. Only a “wall,” “roof,” and “tower” represent the Greek siege of Troy, though it was a war waged for ten years to recover Helen. The richness of the symbols, especially as they function organically within Yeats’s overall poetic context, is astounding.
References to Helen of Troy, in particular, and to many enduring myths of the Greek, Celtic, Christian, Buddhist, or Byzantine eras abound in Yeats’s poems. Because the central dedication of all Yeats’s work as a poet-seer (the true bard of human culture) was always to the mystical, he was drawn constantly to the deep, still waters of humankind’s most profound illuminations, which he tirelessly labored all his life to mold into a unity of vision. The framework upon which he would weave this unified tapestry of mythology was provided by A Vision (1925, 1937); however, the mystical “voices” who communicated the ideas of A Vision (through the medium of his wife Georgie’s automatic writing) guided him carefully so that he would not take the finger (of the system) for the moon (of the mythological poetry): “We have come,” they insisted, “to give you metaphors for poetry.”
Yeats’s A Vision is an elaborate system of the cycles of human ages, with archetypal as well as individual incarnations within the various gyres—both Helen, sprung from Leda, and Yeats’s own beloved Maud Gonne, for example, appear in phase fourteen of the “Phases of the Moon.” Yet grasping all the terrifying, vague features of Yeats’s system may not be as important in this case as simply catching the large clues Yeats offers at the start of the final book of A Vision. There he explains that the present time, 1925, is nearing the peak of one “Historical Cone” of the gyre (the spiraling wheel of time that waxed from the year zero to the year 1050 and wanes to its nadir in the twentieth century). The text of this fifth book of A Vision starts off with the next critical clue, “One must bear in mind that the Christian Era, like the two thousand years, let us say, that went before it, is an entire wheel.” As if to be certain that the complex gyres, wheels, phases, and cones of his visionary symbology do not intrude upon the poetry, Yeats calls the final book of A Vision “Dove or Swan” and reprints there, as a kind of epigraph to the final chapter, the entire text of “Leda and the Swan.”
Yeats means for one to see “Leda and the Swan” in the broad context of A Vision if one is to understand its meaning: As the Swan-God’s impregnation of Leda initiated the Greek age, so did the Dove-God’s impregnation of Mary initiate the Christian age. Since mythic ages last about two thousand years, this age must be on the cusp of a new revelation—an idea Yeats explores in “The Second Coming.”