leda and the swan by william butler yeats

Here, divine force reduces to brute power in somewhat the same way as it does “The Second Coming.”

In effect, in that middle part of the poem, Yeats collapses creation and destruction, suggesting that the same bestial energy flows through both of these acts. There’s a kind of radical foreshortening of temporal experience at what Yeats images as the orgasmic union of the divine and human – “a shudder in the loins” – bringing about the sack of Troy, the murder of the king, all that future contained in this generative, ambiguous violence in the present that the poem describes.They are, in a sense, compressed and imaged and contained in the rape itself. Those future events are glimpsed in the sestet of this poem, in the final six lines.The offspring that the rape engenders includes Helen, the “terrible beauty” for whom the Trojan War was fought also Clytemnestra, the wife of the Greek lord Agamemnon whom Clytemnestra murders on his return from Troy. The myth that Yeats takes up is of Zeus’s rape of the maiden, Leda, whom he attacks as a swan. History, what makes history happen, is imaged here in the form of the rape of the human by the divine in the form of a beast, the form of a swan.Yeats loved transgressive gestures: at the end of his life his impudent 1938 poem “Politics” nonchalantly dismisses the impending Second World War in favor of “that girl standing there.” In the harsh light of #MeToo this recurrent Yeatsian pattern amplifies the questions about knowledge, power, violence, and consent raised by “Leda and the Swan.

At the center of the web, the Irish Civil War of 1922-3 prompts “Leda and the Swan,” in which the rape of “the staggering girl” engenders Helen and her sister Clytemnestra, the women of the Trojan War.

My associative network stretches over a long temporal frame, beginning in 1915 when, declining to write a poem about a British war, Yeats posits “a young girl in the indolence of her youth” as his ideal audience. Exploring an extended network of linguistic and thematic associations, I give “Leda” a presentist and descriptive reading, in conjunction with two less famous poems by Yeats that also situate “girls” in relation to older or more powerful males, and in proximity to Pat Barker’s 2018 novel about Troy, The Silence of the Girls, and photographs of Leda and the Swan by contemporary artist Derrick Santini. How can we re-read “Leda and the Swan” after the exposure of contemporary “rape culture”? I experiment with “weak theory,” which moves away from strong, conclusive arguments in favor of “the proximate, the provisional, and the probabilistic” (Paul Saint-Amour). This essay uses my personal experience as a department Chair to explore a controversial modernist masterpiece in the era of #MeToo.

Leda and the swan by william butler yeats