Leda and the Swan
By William 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 t errified vague fingers push The feathered glory from her loosening th ighs? 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?
Get out the microscope, because because we’re going through t hrough this poem line-by-line.
Lines 1-2 A sudden blow: the great wings beating still Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
The swan comes in from above and knocks the girl off her feet. This swan might be larger than average: his wings are huge. He continues to flap his wings as he descends on Leda, who is "staggering" under its weight and trying to keep her balance. She totters back and forth, under siege from the bird. The bird strokes her thighs. The beginning of the poem takes us by surprise, as Leda is surprised by the ambush of the bird. In reality, few things would be more strange or shocking. The first three words "A sudden blow," bring us close to Leda's perspective.
After being disoriented by the initial attack, she only catches scattered impressions of what happens next. We see and feel the event as Leda would have. We don't have any distance from it, so we're left in the dark about important facts, which contributes to our general feeling of disorientation. In addition, we don't know what form the "sudden blow" takes. Does the bird come in like a paratrooper and knock her over with its big feet, or does it whack her with its wings?
Lines 3-4 By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill, He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
Leda realizes what's caressing her thighs: the dark, rubbery webs of the swan's feet. The swan begins to intertwine its graceful body with hers. It grabs the back or "nape" of her neck with its bill. In line 4, the swan is called "he" for the first time. (Yeats expects that his readers are familiar with the myth of Leda and the swan and know that "he" means Zeus, the head honcho of the Greek gods. Zeus slept with hundreds of women and even some boys, too. In fact, Zeus did something similar to a boy named Ganymede. The god changed himself into an eagle and snatched up Ganymede to be his servant on Mt. Olympus.) The Zeus-swan creature holds Leda's breast to its own feathery breast. Leda is helpless and cannot stop the rape from taking place.
Lines 5-6 How can those terrified vague fingers push The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
This stanza consists of two rhetorical questions. The first question asks how Leda could possibly have prevented the rape. The implication, of course, is that she couldn't have. For one thing, she was too terrified, and for another, she was disoriented, and so her fingers were "vague" about what they would need to do to push away the swan. (In case you were wondering, "feathered glory," is a not-so-thinly-veiled reference to the swan's penis. When you look closely, this poem is surprisingly graphic.) "Vague" is a word worth noting. It makes you wonder if Yeats is implying that Leda is not dead-set against having sex with the swan/Zeus. "Vague" could mean indecisive in this sense: she doesn't know what she wants (not that she'd have a choice either way). Modern day readers may well feel offended by the implication that a rape victim might not have been taken completely against her will. We should say a word about how we might view this poem from an ethical perspective. For one thing, if this were a poem about a sexual assault involving two human beings, there's no way that any poet could get away with using this kind of language. That's because the poem is clearly intended to be sexy and erotic. But obviously, rape is not a turn-on; it's a serious crime. In order to fully understand Yeats's poem, we have to understand how Greek society and religion were different from our own. Zeus was a god. Not just a god, but the chief god. In Greek mythology, the gods could do pretty much whatever they wanted: human standards of ethics didn't apply to them. Many people find this poem or the myth that inspired it to be irresponsible. You could definitely take this stance. Regardless of your position, when reading this poem, it is important to remember that Ancient Greeks had different values.
Lines 7-8 And how can body, laid in that white rush, But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
The second rhetorical question of the second stanza asks how Leda could help fe eling the swan's heart beating against her chest. This question implies that the feeling of the heartbeat is exciting or mysterious. We're still very close to Leda's perspective, and the swan's body is visible only as a "white rush" of fastmoving feathers. The swan's heart is "strange" from two angles: it is both the heart of a god and the heart of an animal. Yeats doesn't use any possessive pronoun to describe whose "body" it is. You might expect, "And how can her body," but instead the line is, "And how can body". It could be any body – yours, mine. Yeats is warning us not to think that we would be any more successful at resisting Zeus than Leda. There's nothing weak or passive about Leda: she just doesn't stand a chance against a god.
Lines 9-10 A shudder in the loins engenders there The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
Since "Leda and the Swan" is a Petrarchan sonnet (see "Form and M eter"), line 10 makes a shift called "the turn." Here the shift is obvious: the swan completes the sexual act. "A shudder in the lines" means that either the bird or Leda has had an orgasm. The swan "engenders" new life inside Leda; that is, he makes her pregnant. Yeats once again assumes that his readers know the end of the myth: that Leda becomes pregnant with the beautiful Helen of Troy, over whom the famous Trojan War will be fought. Troy was the site of an important battle in Greek mythology. It marked the transition between the ancient and modern worlds. The Trojan War was also the source of inspiration for Homer's Iliad, one of the most influential epic stories in Western civilization. Put briefly, the war was fought between the Greeks and the Trojans. Helen was the wife of the Greek king Menelaus, but stolen away to Troy (perhaps willingly, perhaps forcefully) by a young prince named Paris. Menelaus enlisted the help of another, more powerful Greek king, Agamemnon, to besiege or "sack" Troy. After a hard-fought battle, the Greeks completely destroyed Troy. However, when Agamemnon returned home, he was murdered by his wife Clytemnestra. As if things couldn't get more complicated, Clytemnestra was the daughter of Leda and her Spartan husband. The poem suggests that by literally impregnating Leda with Helen, Zeus impregnated her "metaphorically" with the future consequences of Helen's actions: i.e., the Trojan War. The "broken wall" and "burning roof and tower" refer to the famous burning of Troy. So, although Leda didn't directly cause the Trojan War, she is now one of the indirect causes.
Lines 11-12 And Agamemnon dead. Being so caught up, So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
(Note: we're considering line 11 to include both "And Agamemnon dead." and "Being so caught up." Otherwise, the sonnet would have fifteen lines, and sonnets by definition have only fourteen. Yeats breaks up the line on the page in order to add a pause and to transition to a new topic.) The break between 10 and 11 is very dramatic. The poem essentially says that Leda is responsible for the burning of a city and also the death of a great king. Although Agamemnon was one of the victorious Greek kings who actually won the Trojan War, he didn't get to enjoy his victory. He was murdered by his wife Clytemnestra and the lover she took up while her husband was at war. (Clytemnestra was one of Leda's later children, not born of Zeus.) The rest of the poem is a long rhetorical question. The first part of the question begins after the break in line 11. The speaker notes how Leda was "caught up." Remember that in line 3 he describes how the swan had "caught" her with his bill. Leda was "mastered," or overpowered, by Zeus's "brute" or animal nature. Being a bird, his brute blood is "of the air." This last phrase might also lead us to think that the whole encounter takes place while the swan is flying.
Lines 13-14 Did she put on his knowledge with his power Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
The speaker finishes his rhetorical question. He asks if Leda was conscious or aware enough during the encounter to "put on" Zeus's knowledge with his power. The entire poem hinges on this vague expression "put on." We see two possibilities. The first possible meaning is: did Leda realize that Zeus had the omniscient "knowledge" of a god as well the incredible power of a giant bird? She already knows about the power part, but did she also know she was dealing with a god whose knowledge extended far beyond a mere mortal's? In fact, Zeus's knowledge might even extend to knowledge of the future – he knows that their daughter Helen will cause the Trojan War. Did Leda sense that Zeus knew the consequences of his act? The second possible meaning is: did Leda actually acquire some of Zeus's knowledge along with his power? Obviously, she gains power in the sense that the fate of world history is now linked to her own. But did she also gain or "put on" Zeus's all-seeing knowledge, including his knowledge of the future? Did Leda become, in some sense, a goddess herself? With both these possibilities, there's an alternative, an "Or." Or did it all happen too fast? Maybe there wasn't enough time for her to learn of Zeus's knowledge before he set her back on earth, having accomplished his goal. Maybe she was too confused by the initial blow. Maybe she didn't even know it was Zeus who had raped her. The exact wording of the last line makes Zeus sound especially cold: his "indifferent" or unc aring beak released her and "let her drop" on the ground. One of the most interesting aspects of Ancient Greek religion was how the gods seemed to have their own little world, and every once in a while they would swing by the mortals' world to throw a wrench in the plans. Literary folks like Yeats have long been fascinated with this strange dynamic between mortals and immortals in classical religion. There's a lot more to say about this ending and the whole encounter, so visit the other sec tions of our Shmoop analysis to find out more.
