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Yeats' "Leda and the Swan"
Leda and the Divine Swan Leda and the Swan stuns the mind like an appalling ritual. It delivers three thunderbolts:
A sudden blow; A shudder in the loins; and a concluding, unexpected interrogative. Except for the last three lines, the sonnet describes the Zeus's rape of Leda in exclamatory and rhetorically rich figures that conflate action, myth, and history into one supernatural question. Yeats' sonnet melds the context of poem and question. What transmission is possible between the divine and human?
Since the Swan embodies Zeus, king of the gods, the swan-rape is a god-rape, which disconcerts the unknowing when they first encounter the poem. The Immortal assumes an earthly shaped to ravish (and impregnate the unsuspecting. Leda. Classical myths about gods assuming humane forms to intervene in earthly matters are common, as evidenced in Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, and mythology of pre-Socratic and Periclean Greece. Ancient Greeks knew the consequence of the sudden human and divine violence, incorporated in primal myths, rituals, art, and religions, and even the Olympian gods manifested semi-human characteristics and emotions and took sides in human affairs. The protean nature of the gods and the bizarre affairs some of them engaged in gives modern readers pause.As the chief god, Zeus not only fathered lesser gods, but also impregnated mortal women and produced semi-divine offspring with unnatural characteristics. Zeus was always Zeus, even when he assumed the form of a huge swan to attack Leda. In other myths, he disguises himself in the form of a bull or a shower of gold to sire half-humans because to appear to them undisguised, as he did with Semele, destroyed her on the spot. The concrete and graphic imagery in the octave of Leda and the Swan, followed by the flash-forward to the Trojan War, raises questions about the relation of myth to history and the origin of the ultimate question. Yeats version published an early version as Annunciation, and in his mystical-philosophical study A Vision, he prints the poem as Dove and Swan (James Lovic Allen 3192). A sudden blow: the great wings beating stillAbove the staggering girl, her thighs caressedBy the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.How can those terrified vague fingers pushThe 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 thereThe broken wall, the burning roof and towerAnd Agamemnon dead. Being so caught up,So mastered by the brute blood of the air,Did she put on his knowledge with his powerBefore the indifferent beak could let her drop? (The Poems 214 )Yeats dramatizes the unpremeditated of rape by Zeus, the ruling and promiscuous pagan god, presages the murder of Agamemnon and the family revenge that follows in Greek legend and dramaturgy, but only indirectly suggests the reader take up the challenging theories in A Vision. Skeptics of Yeats' crypto-philosophical compendium unwisely link "Leda and the Swan" to his prose study. If Mother of God and The Second Coming form a troika with Leda, the digression might be profitable. Since "Leda and the Swan" gained fame almost upon publication, some overseers of the canon try to discount it, in one way or another.Harold Bloom uses Yvor Winter's as a cat's paw to poke at Leda, in no small part because both Bloom and Winter seem annoyed that Yeats is not Shelley. In Yeats, Bloom, brandishes his theory of precursors developed in The Anxiety of Influence, and spends almost as much space on William Blake and P. B. Shelley as he does on Yeats. Bloom thinks Yeats is over-praised; Winters, dismisses the implication in Leda and the Swan about cycles of history. Winters scoffs at the idea that sexual union is a form of mystical experience, that history proceeds in cycles of two thousand years each, and that the rape of Leda inaugurated a new cy. . . .But no one except Yeats has ever believe these things. (qtd in Bloom 365).
Mythology seems to have slipped from Winter's critical diction, and the cycle of history seems never to have entered it; Giambattista Vico in promulgated it in 1744, and Yeats and James Joyce adopted it in different ways. De-mythologizing much of Yeats is like de-mythologizing the Bible Myths explain in story what is not wholly explicable by known facts. They are metaphors that eventually serve as allusions. Mystical union with god, or some complementary merger gained by the study of the occult, James Allen reminds us, occupied Yeats most of his life (3193). Yet the question raised at the closure of the Yeats' sonnet is not an occult or Gnostic question. If Zeus empowers Leda, impregnating her with Helen does he also share with her any of his god-like knowledge? In Greek mythology—or in Greek daily life—does Zeus care a fig about Leda as anything more than a receptacle? Yeats answers the rhetorical question with the kinetic image of the swan letting Leda drop from his Indifferent beak," a girl used and discarded. One could argue that without. Leda, there would be no Helen, and without Helen, there would be no Greek-Trojan War, no wrath of Achilles, no burning wall in Troy, no Agamemnon dead, and no myriad-minded Homer to recreate it all in verse.
Published: October 03, 2005
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