The Go-Between by L P Hartley reviewed by Gillian Southgate

 

 

This novel was the March book-circle choice, and I recommend it absolutely. It deals with lost innocence, and shows how a young life of hope, expectation and ideals can be scarred by the duplicity of adults. Leo, the boy invited to Brandham Hall in Norfolk by a schoolfriend, experiences at the age of 13 a trauma that causes him to have a nervous breakdown, and undermines his trust in the grown-up world to such an extent that he is rendered impotent, in all senses, in later life. Leo is made so real in his young naivety and hero-worship of the adults he views as gods, that the reader is drawn into his mind and feelings; thus we identify with him, wanting him not to be hurt. The novel is set in 1900, a year that carried for Leo all the promise of hope and expectation of good in the coming 20^th century, but it could have been set in this one, or the one before.  Trust can be dashed in any century, and at any time, at the hands of indifference or misuse, and the story of betrayal is timeless. It might have been handled in a florid way, as modern novels tend to do, but the book doesn’t deal in sensationalism; it respects the reader by treating the narrative with sensitivity and in elegant style.

 

Vulnerable as he is away from home, and full of pre-pubescent tangled feelings, Leo finds himself a messenger, carrying love letters between a tenant farmer and a young woman called Marian Maudsley. She is the daughter of another tenant, a successful city businessman who is renting Brandham Hall from the 9^th Viscount Trimingham, whose family own the estates that it sits on. Maudsley’s wife is engineering a marriage between the Viscount, Hugh, and her beautiful daughter, for social advantage. Marian knows she must marry Hugh, and also knows him to be a good and honourable man, but she wants, at least in the sexual sense, to have Ted, the farmer. It is easy to criticise Marian, but she is in fact another commodity to her family, something to be traded on at a profit, that of social advancement. Hartley is too fine a novelist to make any character in this novel either good, or especially bad; he shows human nature as it is, in all its stages of conflicting emotions, complex needs, and ruthlessness. Leo is blatantly used by Marian and Ted for their own ends, in the looming shadow of Marian’s impending engagement and marriage. At the end of the novel, they are discovered in flagrante by Mrs. Maudsley and Leo. Mrs. Maudsley’s screams of shock, anger and the realisation that this might affect her daughter’s prospects, terrify Leo as he watches the act of love for the first time, on the ground right in front of him. From that moment, he is destroyed. Not only Leo,  but Ted himself is destroyed, who knowing he will lose the woman he loves and the lands he is farming, takes up his gun and shoots himself. Marian marries Hugh, and he brings up Ted’s child, but Marion deals with life after her marriage by fabricating the delusion that her relationship with Ted was pure and right. Empty, broken Leo can only see the legacy of her selfishness in the shape of her grandson, afraid himself to marry, wanting to love but being unable to. He is constrained by the knowledge of the family history, and his own fear of devastating hurt that may blight his life. He feels cursed, and the older Marian exhorts the older Leo to go and persuade him to get married, which Leo, her servant to the end, undertakes to do  This final errand occurs many years after World War I has taken the lives of her brothers and of Hugh himself; a conflict which cursed the 20^th century, resulting in a second world war, the use of an atomic bomb, and arguably, the destruction of psychological health.

 

The novel abounds with symbolism, class issues (very real in the plot) and is finely, thoughtfully structured, in the very best story-telling tradition that Hartley was heir to. It absolutely lacks, as it should, the novelist’s own ego, slapdash writing, wonky plotting and the preoccupation with cliff-edge titillation that characterises so many modern novels. It has autobiographical elements of the life of Hartley himself, but it is not an autobiography first and foremost. It testifies to his natural gifts as a writer. He won in recognition of these gifts one of the highest prizes awarded to a work of literature, the Heineman Foundation Prize of the Royal Society of Literature in 1954.  You may have seen the film, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter and atmospheric music by Michel LeGrand. It's excellent, faithful to the text, but nothing in it moves the reader as much as the experience of reading the novel; it really does deserve close consideration.

Robert Birley, mainly in South Africa by C J (Jonty) Driver, 44pp; available from Author (see below)

It is always a pleasure to review anything written by Jonty Driver.  His latest literary offering is a personal memoir of Robert Birley, a distinguished educationalist and ex-Headmaster of Eton who died 40 years ago this year and whose achievements will be sadly unknown to a younger generation.

Jonty writes movingly of how Robert Birley first befriended him and helped him to escape from inevitable victimisation in apartheid South Africa. One of Jonty’s charms as a writer is his readiness to share his vulnerabilities with his readers and at this moment in his life he was a deeply troubled young man.  Robert Birley became an important catalyst in his rescue.  The memoir continues as a fascinating narrative of their developing friendship.  A vivid portrait of a great and a good man emerges from these pages,  a man who deserves to be remembered.

Robert Birley’s achievements were massive. Jonty focuses strongly on  one of his lesser talents. He was a brilliant facilitator, acting as a go-between linking the right people at the right moment to solve or retrieve a situation. At the end of the memoir, Jonty defends the "old boy network" which Robert Birley used so skilfully to help so many people, “of course it shouldn’t be necessary but there is nothing virtuous in everyone getting the same equally bad treatment so if I have an opportunity to make things easier for an individual I do so without compunction", wise and humane words which could apply to Jonty himself. I can say that with conviction because our Winchelsea Literary Society has benefitted so richly from Jonty’s own old boy network.

Perhaps Robert Birley’s greatest claim to fame is his role in re-building the German educational system after 1945, a task which earned him the honorary title, "Headmaster of Germany”. It is tempting to speculate on how different the world might be if he had been given the comparable commission of de-toxifying Soviet education after the death of Stalin in 1953. The young Vladimir Putin might have turned out very differently 

Howard Norton

To obtain a copy, contact Jonty by e-mailing him* with your physical address; in return he can ask you either for a cheque or for a payment of £7-00 into his account by BACS.

*jontydriver@hotmail.com 

Winchelsea ; Alex Preston's talk about his recently published novel; 18 March 2022

 

Residents of Winchelsea reassured by their social isolation in a historic hermitage might have been discomfited to find themselves exposed through the transient probing of the searchlight of Andy Warhol’s 15-minute celebrity. In the space of a week, the redoubtable Clare Balding and her historical-context delivery man rambled across from Winchelsea Beach to the citadel and laid bare our antient town’s idiosyncrasies to those massed ranks of Middle England who constitute the Radio 4 audience.  Barely had the Ramblers retreated to the archival sanctuary of BBC Sounds than Alex Preston found himself warily confronting the combined forces of the town’s Literary and Museum Societies in the New Hall where he had been invited to introduce his fourth and most recent novel, Winchelsea, to the assembled citizenry.   

Despite a critical following wind from the favourable reviews by publications ranging from The Economist to The Hastings Independent Paper, our speaker attributed his unease to a previous chastening experience where he was castigated by an audience member for the engineering solecism of placing a crankshaft in the engine of the 1930s Italian saloon car, a Fiat Ardita, in which two of the characters in his third novel were fleeing Florence.  Alex anxiously scanned the audience trying to divine the identity of the audience member possibly tasked with the relentless fact checking of his talk, on behalf of whichever jurat currently curates Winchelsea’s arcana.  Potential readers were assured of his respect when he declared that he favoured Virginia Woolf’s approach of treating the reader as an educated amateur.  Since sense of place was the key factor for author and audience, Preston’s listeners were interested in his list of associations with Winchelsea beginning with a visit as a two-year-old.  He told of the personally eventful odyssey which had created his romantically contorted Winchelsea; a night there drenched in bright moonlight, a storm out at sea witnessed from the town and the sense of its subterranean world of cellars and tunnels culminating in rubbing shoulders with the shade of his latest fictional heroine during a Cellar Tour.  His Muse also drew inspiration from the area’s past literary luminaries – Ford Madox Ford, Stephen Crane and Henry James, including the last’s fascination with Thackeray’s unfinished Rye/Winchelsea saga Denis Duval.  Lest all this seems excessively ethereal, he also bonded with the locale through wild swimming at Pett Level. 

  The author then treated us to a reading from the book where the town, its surroundings and the prevailing weather were described in lyrical prose.  The plot lines of the novel were explored in some detail; the vibrant smuggling industry of the 1740s and the modus operandi of the rival Hawkhurst and Mayfield gangs, the Jacobite leanings of some of the characters, genuflections before the modern cultural iconostasis in the ambiguous sexuality of the heroine  and the racially inclusive dramatis personae and a  crescendo building to a climactic Armageddon where revenge is dispensed in measures sufficient to leave even the Count of Monte Cristo sated.  It was entirely understandable that an audience, assailed for the last 2 years by myriad microbes whose battle standards bore devices drawn exclusively from the Greek alphabet, should fail to mount the required immune response and succumb en masse to the virus of literary narcissism, charging forward to purchase the essence of Winchelsea captured in this eponymous novel.  Sadly, Clare Balding missed Alex Preston’s talk but had she and her companion rambled on to Rye and sought to slake their thirst at the first hostelry they would have learnt from the board over the entrance to the Ship Inn of the resilience of smuggling as a local industry in the mixture of despair and exasperation permeating Lord Pembroke’s 1781 quotation displayed there “Will Washington take America or smugglers England first?”  and might perhaps have been minded to summon sympathetic sentiments for the crew of Rye’s Revenue Cutter, Amelia, tasked with sailing into a steady, if sometimes only metaphorical, headwind in their unavailing struggle against the integral part of the local economy that was smuggling. 

William Doherty   

 

" A Literary Landscape of Sussex" talk by Dr. Geoffrey Mead to Winchelsea Literary Society, 25 February 2022

"Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him." The arresting opening sentence of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock emerged as Dr. Geoffrey Mead’s most startling quotation in the whirlwind tour of the Sussex literary landscape which he delivered to an appreciative Lit. Soc. audience. Patcham born and bred, Dr. Mead from the Geography Department at Sussex University had deployed his highly developed sense of place to successfully navigate the storm-wracked road to Winchelsea which had defeated the scheduled speaker, Alina Templeman. Proud of his Brighton roots, he contended that the importance of Sussex’s biggest town had been consistently underestimated, although the legacy of those whose attention was drawn to the place could be mixed, as Mead himself admitted in quoting from Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse; "Brighton looks like a town that is constantly helping the police with their enquiries". 

The audience was interested to learn that Graham Greene declined any claims to literary proprietorship when he said that Patrick Hamilton’s "West Pier" was the best book about Brighton. Hamilton also burnished his hometown’s raffish reputation in the post-war decades with his Hangover Square, a lurid account of the doings of the wild girls who were its residents.

Although most Londoners headed for Sussex were probably targeting Brighton, the opening image for the talk had been a 1938 Southern Railway poster showing a bearded rustic on the Downs evocative of Belloc’s poem lauding the great hills of the South Country, penned in Shipley, West Sussex where the writer lived close to the old Templar church. 

For those anxious about recent climate drama there was some reassurance in tradition with a description from The Anglo- Saxon Chronicle of 1014 of floods in our county which were exactly replicated in 2214. For those globalists, restless under a surfeit of parochialism, the county’s historic reach was highlighted by an unsolicited testimonial from the Venetian Senate (1397), commending the commodious harbour at Portus Camera (Camber to us nowadays). As the potential invasion coast, Sussex has been meticulously mapped by Government and we were shown a pre-Armada (1587) depiction where the detail included the information that the Gage family at Firle, as Catholics, were considered politically suspect. Their faith did not inhibit their utilising the stone from the dissolved Lewes Priory to rebuild Firle Place.

Primarily an antiquarian, William Camden traversed the country for Britannia (1586) where he commented on the flourishing iron mines and the furnace and hammer ponds in the ghylls which powered the bellows and hammers needed to work the iron. This drew on the wood available on the Weald as did the gunpowder mills and the Navy’s shipbuilding programme. It was surprising to learn that it could take two years for oxen to drag the trunk of a large oak on pallets along the swamp-like Sussex trails to the Royal Dockyards at Chatham. 

Celia Fiennes’ side-saddle tours of late Stuart England are an instructive primary source on society and the nascent industrial economy although admittedly she had an understandable predilection for fashionable towns and spas. She recounts the Great Storm of 1703 where deposits of salt could be found on leaves as far inland as Ticehurst. With his geographer’s hat on, Geoffrey noted approvingly that this would be consistent with the storm driving moisture from the sea all the way from Saltdean up the valley to Ticehurst. 

The much-lamented apathy which invests contemporary local politics was not apparent in East Hoathly where Thomas Turner reported disputes among the Vestry over the Poor Rate ending in sword fights. Turner attributes this to artifice, deceit and knavery although holding the meetings in the local ale house could have contributed to the febrile atmosphere.

From Burwash, Rudyard Kipling applied a romantic allure to a local pastime in his "Smugglers’ Song":

"Brandy for the Parson, ‘Baccy for the Clerk,

Laces for a lady, letters for a spy"

but the largely unreported and very profitable practice of owling, the illegal export of wool from England was particularly rife on Romney Marsh. Accounts could be subjective and the agronomist background of the celebrated rural rider, William Cobbett, may explain his dismissal of Ashdown Forest as "villainously, ugly spoil". It was galling for the Winchelsea audience to learn that Daniel Defoe had given their town and Rye barely half a line in his "A tour through the whole island of Great Britain", while Tunbridge Wells, the Las Vegas of West Kent according to our speaker, received four and a half pages for its aristocratic promenade in the Pantiles and its notorious raffling shops. I suppose he had to find material for MollFlanders and Roxana somewhere and to plant the seeds of civic outrage for future generations of Disgusted complainants to newspapers. Closet Corbynistas could draw solace from the torch still being carried for the Hastings-set The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist by Robert Tressell and those who like a bit of internecine literary satire can look afresh at Dallington, the Howling of Stella Gibbons’s "Cold Comfort Farm" which parodied the early "loam and lovechild" output of the productive Northiam resident, Sheila Kaye-Smith.

Having touched all the bases and stopped shaking the kaleidoscope of Sussex scenes coupled with literary quotations, Dr. Mead slid gently onto home plate with Sir Frank Short’s 1910 painting, "Winchelsea Marshes", and an evocative, forlorn and necessarily foreshortened picture of the Winchelsea Windmill before the Great Storm of 1987 left us only with the grindstones and endemic nasal abrasions.

William Doherty

Belfast. Review by Bill Doherty of Kenneth Branagh's film

 

I had always enjoyed seeing Kenneth Branagh in films and TV serialisations - Henry V, Peter’s Friends and Fortunes of War - and knowing he came from a Northern Ireland Protestant background, was interested in finding out what insights his new film Belfast would offer on the city’s recent violent past.   In this instance, Branagh had written the screenplay and directed the film but was not featuring in a cast given the ballast of authenticity  by  the Irish backgrounds of the principal actors (Judi Dench squeezes in courtesy of an Irish  mother).  The sense of place was endorsed in glowing reviews from Belfast-born critics who generally gushed over the film as a walk down memory lane.  The autobiographical load is carried by the eleven-year- old Jude Hill who portrays the young Branagh.  

The film opens with Buddy, the young Kenneth, being called into his terrace house by Ma as he plays in his working-class street and turns to face the camera waving a wooden sword in one hand and a metal dustbin lid, doubling as a shield, in the other.  The dustbin lid was destined to become emblematic of the Troubles as the female occupants of whole streets banged them to warn of incursions by the Army or the police.  An unheralded incursion by a violent mob shatters this idyll of childhood innocence and Ma sallies forth to pull Buddy into the safety of the house.  Visibly terrified, Buddy and Ma, crouching down, look out as the mob violently expels the few Catholic residents from this Protestant street.  Having set the contextual background which was to mark the next three decades of life in Belfast, the director focuses on Buddy’s family.  Pa (Jamie Dornan) is a contract worker who spends weeks at a time working in the south of England while Ma (Catriona Balfe) looks after the house and family. Since both came to acting after careers as prominent models and Dornan is best known as Christian in the 50 Shades film trilogy, questions have been posed about inappropriate glamourisation of proletarian Belfast.  Pa’s parents, Pop and Granny, are played by the fine character actors Ciarán Hinds and Judi Dench, neither of whom need to move up from second gear for their undemanding roles.  Buddy has a teenage older brother, Will.

Three male-female relationships provide the framework for the film.  Pop’s persistent cough, references to past employment in heavy industry in England and recurring mentions of hospital appointments mark him as a participant in a parallel drama - Chronicle of a Death Foretold.   Enthroned in regal splendour on the outside WC, he dispenses folksy aphorisms to Buddy while Granny listens from the backroom, interjecting corrections to Pop’s narrative. Things are rather more strained between Ma and Pa, with his absences in England and his debts which she is laboriously paying off. Pa is keen to emigrate – Australia, Canada, England? – while Ma is rooted in the Belfast of her childhood.  Buddy’s eye is fixed on the clever, blonde girl who is top of his class and is inspired to greater academic efforts by the prospect of sharing a desk with her.  They bond as Maths adepts.

The dramatic tension over whether the family goes or stays tilts towards the exit with the advent of sinister Loyalist paramilitaries who give Pa the choice of joining or making regular financial contributions to the cause.  Buddy is coaxed into joining a mass break in and looting of a local supermarket by a mischievous cousin and Pa realises that his elder son is also in the paramilitaries’ net as an errand boy.  Buddy is rescued from an ugly hostage situation with armed Loyalists by the Army. The family dilemma is amplified as we see Will and Buddy at Sunday School where a mandible-chomping, Paisleyesque hellfire cleric belabours the metaphor of the fork in the road. The Leave metaphor persists in lighter moments in full colour where the family see Chitty Chitty Bang Bang at the local cinema and watch the scene where the eponymous all-purpose car is used to effect an escape from the white cliffs. Pop dies, as earlier signposted, and is remembered at an exceptionally lively wake. The film closes with the family boarding the airport bus and waving farewell to Granny as she stands outside her terraced house, having instructed them never to look back.  The final shot in colour shows the giant cranes of the Harland and Wolff yard illuminated against the night sky and features a dedication with a cosmopolitan touch, an echo of the title of the third volume in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet; Storia di chi fugge e di chi resta.  For those who left and those who stayed.

The screenplay was written by Branagh who also directed the work.  Haris Zambarloukos provides wonderful cinematography rendering almost all the film in flat, clean black and white with vivid close ups of strained and emotionally taut faces.  The musical soundtrack is dominated by another Belfast voice, Van Morrison, and the acting is uniformly excellent.  Criticism of the sanitised, superficial and sentimental portrayal of Belfast is deflected by the director’s contention that it is seen through the eyes of a young boy, but it fails to generate dramatic tension and the family’s debate on moving to the south of England for employment could just as easily have been set in Ancoats, Toxteth, Byker or Govan.  Set in a Protestant working class community like Branagh’s own Mountcollyer St. in the Tiger’s Bay district, it is a paean of praise to a pre-Troubles Protestant Belfast.  We watch Ma explain to Buddy that Catholics believe Confession wipes the slate of iniquity clean and that they souse themselves in Holy Water.  Whether this justifies burning them out their houses remains an unasked question as does which locals directed the invading mob to the Catholic houses.  The whole community seems to fall in quietly with the new dispensation of paramilitaries and barricades.  

This hollowed out Belfast, sprinkled with stardust and avoiding the issues that make it a unique British city may not only reflect the director’s addiction to saccharin and a shrewd eye for box office success but possibly a conscious decision to avoid meatier material.  There was an almost tangential indication that Pa was fearful his sons were being caught up in the paramilitaries’ net.  On Remembrance Sunday 2001, the 18-year-old Glen Branagh of Mountcollyer St., Tiger’s Bay, described as “a distant relative” of Kenneth, died when, according to a police witness, a home-made pipe bomb he was throwing into a crowd of Catholics exploded prematurely.  As late as 2018 young Glen, a member of the paramilitary Ulster Defence Association’s youth wing, was still being memorialised on a banner directed at the adjacent Nationalist New Lodge Estate.  A Glen rather than a Buddy as the central protagonist might have produced a more dramatic and revelatory film.  

In conclusion, Branagh’s film is a success in terms of cinematic virtuosity, strong acting and comforting sentimentality but in its exploration of the clamant social issues of the day is more Gone with the Wind than In the Heat of the Night.  A suggestion to which Branagh would probably assert “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn!”.    

 

Bricks, by Gillian Southgate

.

BRICKS

 

The book, discovered at a Christmas fair,

Shows pictures of a brickyard in the cold.

The men wear braces, shirtsleeves, greasy caps,

Their brows are lined; they could be young, or old.

Each face is strained, resigned; the work is tough.

I marvel that they stood it; did they earn enough?

England expanded on these working men;

For centuries they broke their backs and hands

To raise the thronging buildings of this land.

The great, the gabled, chimneyed, terraced, tall,

The modest home, the Court, the Lodge, the Hall.

In Flemish bond, and English, England spread,

And now the brickies are all gone, all dead.

Yet in these red-leaved days of dying fall,

The sun recalls them, down the garden wall.

 This poem was one of the winning entries in a recent "The Oldie" Literary competition. A poem on the theme "Bricks" was the set subject of the competition. Congratulations to Gillian for once again having a winning entry in this monthly competition, and thanks to her for permission to post it on the blog.

How form and language act to produce and enhance meaning in W B Yeats’s poem “Leda and the Swan.” by William Doherty (See below for the text of the poem).

 

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?