Even the gossip columnists of our most salacious contemporary scandal sheets can only cast covetous glances at the tales from Greek Mythology where unlikely couplings with explosive consequences abound. One such tale forms the nucleus of Yeats’s short poem “Leda and the Swan”, which compels the interested reader to explore the ways form and language produce and enhance meaning in this superficially succinct sonnet. There is no single Authorised Version of the Greek myths and the detail within any given story varies across the multiplicity of sources but, in essence, the Leda/Swan myth recounts how the Spartan queen Leda experiences serial impregnation by her husband and the Ancient Greek deity Zeus, who is transformed into a swan for the encounter. Subsequently, Leda gives birth to a quartet of characters who have key parts in some ensuing mythological dramas.
The title “Leda and the Swan” is a matter of fact, open-ended heading which to the uninitiated could herald anything from a short story for small children to a runner from the currently “mode-ish” stable of nature writing. My own slim volume of Yeats’s poetry includes it but without any explanatory annotation and intriguingly it escapes specific mention in a lengthy foreword by a later Irish poet who also harboured broadly nationalist sympathies, Seamus Heaney. “Leda” was published in 1923, a year when Yeats won the Nobel Prize for Literature and in the poem Among School Children which features in the same collection, he describes himself as a “Sixty-year-old smiling public man”. So, arguably, many readers would havebeen familiar with the cultural, philosophical and political soil in which the seeds of Yeats’s work had germinated and might have approached the poem expecting literary fireworks, possibly coming forearmed from the recent consultation of a reference book on the Greek myths.
The poem is short, 15 lines of equal length in total apart from one split line where the second half drops to the line below to produce another, albeit delayed, half line creating a possible signpost to a narrative shift. It comprises 2 quatrains and a 6/7- line final stanza. The language is simple with many short words which would not require the average reader to reach for the dictionary. This preponderance of short, brusque words allows the narrative to build the ambience of menace and tension for what, in this version of the myth, is essentially a rape scene. The narrative voice strikes a detached, clinical note like a pathologist forensically recording autopsy findings into a Dictaphone. The effect is reinforced by using iambic pentameter as the predominant metre, familiar to the English ear from myriad poemsand even favoured by Dickens who read many of his works in instalments to his public.Some empathy with Leda’s predicament is discernible in the metaphors “helpless breast”,“terrified, vague fingers” and the hint of discomfiture in “body” feeling “the strange, heart beating …”. There is a transition or tipping point in the sonnet with the first line of the final stanza where the opening phrase “A shudder in the loins…” closes the rape scene and turns towards its consequences. This compact, decisive phrase echoes the one introducing the narrative where “A sudden blow:...” heralds the immediately ensuing violent action and invites the reader’s full attention. The description of the assault on Leda emphasises the confused representation of Zeus, simultaneously divine, a swan and often presented in human form. Those whose interest was sufficiently piqued by the sonnet for them to “Google” the mating habits of swans would have learnt that Zeus has eschewed the elaborate swan courting rituals of rubbing and entwining necks in favour of human or Olympian direct action and that it is customary for the male swan to stabilise the female while mating by gripping the nape of her neck in his bill. The” breast upon breast” description of this coupling in the first quatrain is decidedly human and this focus on such a hybrid heritage may contribute to the varied nature of the offspring from this encounter. As a frequent visitor to the country estates of the Anglo-Irish gentry and a confessed swan enthusiast, (see The Wild Swans at Coole), the poet would have been familiar with the birds’ behaviour. Similarly, he would probably have been aware of swans’ post-coital rituals of endearment giving a discordant, alien finality to the last line of the poem where “…the indifferent beak…let her drop?”. Perhaps Zeus had foreknowledge of the later aphorism attributed to Galen “Post coitum omne animal triste est” and it came to mind as his testosterone storm abated.
The discipline enforced by the sonnet format is seen in the rhyme scheme in the first two stanzas abab, cdcd. These are all strong, masculine end rhymes although one line in each quatrain is allowed to run on and in both instances these are descriptions of the most overtly anatomically sexual phases of the narrative. This device softens the metaphors inherent in “…thighs caressed by dark webs…” and “…push, The feathered glory from…” The latter example of figurative language verges on the extravagant as the male swan’s sexual organ is diminutive, only emerging from the bird’s cloaca during mating although even among the leisured Anglo-Irish gentry few may have attained this depth of knowledge in the field of ornithological reproductive physiology. Poetic licence or not, “…feathered glory…” amplifies the sense of menace in the story and induces sympathy for the victim. The opening stanza in particular uses alliteration to rack up narrative tension. There are five words beginning with “h” in the last line and the repetition of the sibilant “s + consonant" in “staggering”, “caressed”,“breast” and “still” and words ending in “s” “wings”, “webs”, “helpless” and “holds”. These sequences of short, emphatically ending words are unsettling and threatening and this added charge helps both to enhance meaning and expand the narrative content. The rhyming of “caressed” and “breast” strikes a discordant note augmenting the jarring nature of the opening stanza.
In the final stanza the rhyme scheme switches from the decisive abab pattern to the relative complexity of efgefg (if we fuse the split lines) and allows the narrative to introduce more nuanced ideas. The choice of the figurative word “engenders” moves the reader’s attention from the completed sexual act to its future consequences which are distant in time and inconsistently recounted. The strong alliterative “r” repeated in the opening lines “there…broken…burning roof …tower” preconditions the reader to the violently destructive ending to the siege of Troy. Line 3 takes him beyond that as it opens with the capitalised conjunction, and delivering the flat finality of Agamemnon’s fate as Nemesis cuts her swathe through the victorious, disputatious Greeks. Registering Agamemnon’s death in this manner implies the poem is aligned with the version of the myth where Clytemnestra, the king’s wife, is also his executioner. She is like her sister Helen, the casus belli of the Trojan War, a daughter of Leda, and was conceived during Leda’s sequential couplings with Zeus and her husband. This concise signposting concludes the theme of violence begetting violence which has sustained the narrative. Splitting line 3 creates a mechanism for a tangential rerouting of the story to impute acquiescence, agency and ultimately blame to Leda for her part in the rape. The accusation is initially veiled with the exculpatory “…mastered by the brute blood of the air,” whose staccato alliteration evokes repeated blows and overwhelming power and the more ambivalent “…caught up,” with both phrases being channelled by the repetition of a preceding “so”. The seed having been planted in the reader’s mind, the artistic stiletto slides between the ribs of Leda’s character as he is asked “Did she put on his knowledge with his power…”. In his later rather public preoccupation with sex, the poet did espouse the idea of a transfer of intellectual and spiritual capital between participants during the climactic moments of sexual intercourse. That is what is being implied here and was foreshadowed in the deployment of ”… vague fingers” and ”… loosening thighs” in the second quatrain.
Figurative language has allowed more meaning and vivid imagery to be squeezed from the spare allocation of words permitted by the form of this poem; the synecdoche of “…helpless breast…”, “…terrified …fingers…” and the metaphorical “…white rush…”.
Both Leda and swans feature elsewhere in the context of the poet’s works, notably in stanzas II, III and IV of “Among School Children” where, inspired by addressing a class of young convent schoolgirls, he ruminates on a lost love whom he likens to Leda and ominously invokes comparison with the more contentious ”… daughters of the swan…”. The swan is the object of contemplative scrutiny in stanza III of “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” and throughout “The Wild Swans at Coole” while the burning of Troy in “No Second Troy” is likened to the destructive trajectory of his beloved Maud Gonne’s politics.
The myth of Leda and the Swan has always provided moral cover for creative minds, allowing the portrayal of sex but deflecting opprobrium by introducing a mythological participant. Yeats explained his later preoccupation with the mechanics of sex with “When I was young my muse was old but now I am old, my muse is young.” The technical virtuosity exhibited within the confines of the sonnet format in the use of form and language both produce and enhance meaning in “Leda and the Swan” but knowledge of Greek mythology and of the mating habits of swans helps maximise its extraction.
Leda and
the Swan
BY 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?
