Leda and the Swan

In Greek mythology, Zeus appears to Leda in the form of a swan and rapes her. She gives birth to Helen and Clytemnestra. This act marks the beginning of Greek civilization for 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 5 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 tower10 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?

W. B. Yeats (1923)

Introduction and Context

Written in 1923 and first published in The Dial before appearing in The Tower (1928), “Leda and the Swan” is one of Yeats’ most compressed and disturbing meditations on history, violence, and divine encounter. The poem reimagines the Greek myth of Zeus, who takes the form of a swan to rape Leda, the mortal mother of Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra. This violent act, Yeats suggests, inaugurates a new epoch of civilization—the classical age of Greece—while foreshadowing its eventual destruction in the Trojan War.

Yeats was fascinated by the cycles of history and spiritual revelation that he explored in A Vision (1925), his complex system of “gyres” representing recurring patterns of birth, decay, and renewal. In this framework, the rape of Leda marks a pivotal turning of the gyre: divine power violently intrudes into human history, creating a moment of transformation that is both creative and catastrophic.

The poem’s opening line, “A sudden blow,” plunges the reader into the immediacy of assault—its language is tactile, physical, and unflinching. Yeats’ choice of the sonnet form (14 lines, ABAB CDCD EFEF GG) imposes classical order upon chaos, mirroring how myth and art attempt to contain the incomprehensible. Yet the poem’s syntax, full of enjambment and violent motion, resists that containment: the act remains unresolved, its moral and metaphysical implications unsettled.

Yeats’s treatment of myth is characteristically Modernist: he reinterprets a traditional narrative to explore contemporary anxieties about power, gender, knowledge, and the cyclical nature of human history. The poem’s fusion of sensual and spiritual imagery—“feathered glory,” “strange heart beating,” “brute blood of the air”—invites consideration about how divine revelation and sexual violence are intertwined. The final question—“Did she put on his knowledge with his power?”—remains unanswered, capturing the paradox of transcendence through violation.

For contemporary readers, “Leda and the Swan” retains its power and discomfort. It raises questions about the relationship between creativity and destruction, knowledge and domination, beauty and brutality. The myth’s violence reverberates through history, echoing modern warfare and political upheaval. Yeats transforms myth into a lens through which to examine both personal and civilizational trauma—making this brief sonnet one of the most potent expressions of Modernist tension between chaos and form.

Questions for Consideration

1. How does Yeats depict the violence of the encounter between Leda and the swan? What sensory imagery dominates the poem?
2. In what ways does the sonnet form constrain or intensify the poem’s violent subject matter?
3. How does Yeats connect the mythic act to historical consequences—“the broken wall, the burning roof and tower / And Agamemnon dead”?
4. What might Yeats mean by suggesting that divine rape could “engender” civilization?
5. How does the poem explore the relationship between power and knowledge?
6. What is the effect of the poem’s unanswered final question? Does Yeats suggest that revelation is possible through trauma—or that it is forever incomplete?
7. How does Yeats use contrast—between beauty and brutality, flesh and spirit, divinity and mortality—to shape meaning?
8. How does “Leda and the Swan” reflect Yeats’s theory of cyclical history and the turning of the gyres from A Vision?
9. What Modernist characteristics are present in this poem? Consider its mythic allusion, fragmentation, and moral ambiguity.
10. How does the poem engage questions of gender and agency? Is Leda passive, complicit, or transformed?