'Leda and the Swan’ was composed by William Butler Yeats in the form of a traditional sonnet. It is about the rape of a “staggering girl” Leda by God Zeus, in the form of a swan and poem expresses the consequences of it using sexually explicit images. It is important to note that the idea of ‘rape’ that comes through the poetry is because it is written from Leda’s perspective.
This poem is written in iambic pentameter consisting of an octave and a sestet. The octave narrates how Zeus metamorphoses into a big swan and with a “sudden blow” rapes Leda. The poor girl could not retaliate being “caught in his bill” while the God “holds her helpless breast upon his breast”. The poem is permeated with allusions of mystical ideas about the universe and the Greek mythology, linking Helen of Troy and Leda.
Yeats's speaker then wonders whether Leda could defy the “feathered glory from her loosening thighs”. By using a number of bold, visual images and asking a number of rhetorical questions, the poet wishes to convey that human beings do bow down in front of the affairs of nature or fate just like the hapless girl, Leda surrendered and allowed Zeus to rape her.
The single event has been used to understand the larger politics of Yeats’s times. Yeats had his heart set on conveying that a new era is going to start; the era of violence and destruction. This could be a reference to Irish struggle for independence and how Yeats perceived history using the theory of gyres. The interference of the divine in human affairs is not shown in glorious terms as it is the seed of destruction that Leda conceived. With the assault of Leda, Helen of Troy would be born and lead the entire Greek Civilization to demolition epitomized by “the broken tower” and “burning roof and tower” of the city. Leda “being mastered by the brute blood of the air” would turn the tables on the entire civilization as by the virtue of her experience with Zeus, she has acquired a knowledge too difficult to carry with oneself. Yeats brings out a baffling question referring to the conception of the destructive civilization. Probably she enriched herself with the power that Zeus practiced over her and the knowledge of the consequences of this act while Zeus becomes powerless having “indifferent beak”. Hence, the sestet is devoted to some moral and philosophical issues humankind needs to contemplate, thus making the poem universal.
