Leda_and_the_Swan

Essay: “Leda and the Swan is more than a poem about bestiality and rape.” Discuss. Certain important historical events have a need to take place and Yeats detects the major events in history and sees their connections. Yeats also asks questions and reinterprets those events, developing them into his poems obliquely. Throughout his poem Leda and the Swan, Yeats brings forth questions such as ‘Did Zeus intend the events of the Trojan War to occur'’ and ‘Is Zeus uncaring about the people he uses to bring about these events'’ Despite the strong historical context the poem encompasses, readers’ first impressions of Leda and the Swan usually involve that it is about bestiality and rape. Leda and the Swan is retelling a story from Greek mythology, the rape of the girl Leda by the god Zeus, who had assumed the form of a swan. The story is written from the perspective of the girl, Leda, which helps to form the image of the poem being in a negative light, one about bestiality and rape. Yeats takes on this myth and uses it to show how the rape of Leda leads to destruction – the moment Zeus realises what he has done marks the beginning of the destruction of Troy, “The broken wall, the burning roof and tower” and King Agamemnon (King of Greece), “and Agamemnon dead.” While “The broken wall” is dealing with the destruction of Troy, it is also concerned with the ‘destruction’ of Leda’s virginity. Since the pregnancy is taking place in the form of rape, it is contrasting with the bible, how God makes Mary pregnant with Jesus, thus salvation being born. Whereas in Leda and the Swan, it is not salvation being born, rather the complete opposite. Furthermore, Leda and the Swan is valuable for its powerful and evocative language while allows for its readers to imagine vividly this bizarre phenomenon of the girl’s rape by a swan. Yeats uses word that have an indicating powerful action, such as “sudden blow,” “beating,” “staggering,” “shudder” and “burning.” He then combines these words with descriptive words that are an indication to the readers how weak and helpless Leda is compared to Zeus, this is because when a God has his way with a human being, the human cannot do anything about it. The use of words like “caressed”, “helpless”, “terrified”, “vague” and “loosening” help to increase the sensory impact of Yeats’ poem. In addition to the intertwined meaning of the Battle of Troy, the key line of the poem, “indifferent beak”, deals with the fact that the swan, Zeus, does not care about the girl, Leda. It is as if Leda has been picked up, used and then simply thrown away. Zeus used Leda to help bring about the future battle and destruction of Troy, Zeus is “indifferent”. She was mere tool in his quest to set out the future. As this rape brings forth a pregnancy, it is this pregnancy that brought about the Trojan War. After Leda was raped by Zeus, it is said that she laid eggs that hatched into Clytemnestra and Helen and the war-gods Castor and Polydeuces. The Greek Helen becomes the most beautiful woman in the world and gets kidnapped by the Trojans, so the Greeks besiege Troy. After the war Clytemnestra, the wife of the Greek leader Agamemnon, had her husband murdered. This war had a lasting impact; it brought about the end of the ancient mythological era and the birth of modern history. This aids the statement that Leda and the Swan is more than a poem about bestiality and rape. Yeats’ poem Leda and the Swan had many readers find only the sexual explicitness involved rather than seeing it for what it truly was; that of one of the most technically brilliant poems ever written in the English language. Yeats was praised for his choices in diction and use of language, imagery and rhyme. Excerpts such as ‘great wings’ and ‘terrified vague fingers’ are examples of the imagery used in the poem. They contributed to the total and powerful effect that Leda and the Swan managed to present. This once more proving how Leda and the Swan is more than a poem about bestiality and rape as it encompasses high levels of technical work, such work that can be forgotten due to what has been assumed of the poem to be concerned with. Furthermore, Leda and the Swan is a poem that begins abruptly, the swan assaults Leda with ‘a sudden blow’. This simple yet powerful phrase emphasises the explosive violence of the act. The context of the poem is strange in the way the swan is never referred to as a swan, but rather expressed with images like ‘great wings’ and ‘dark webs’. Leda is also simple referred to as ‘the girl’ who has been caught in the bird’s beak like a small helpless animal. The line ‘He hold her helpless breast upon his breast’ deals with the crushing movement of Leda being pinned against Zeus, the swan, as it involves repetition of the word ‘breast’ as the two are joined together – helps reinforce this. The last stanza of the poem entails the key part of the poem Leda and the Swan. There is a change of tense to past tense and this serves to see the poem in terms of its historical significance. Questions arise in this stanza such as if Leda knew the consequences of what was happening to her by this ‘brute blood of the air’ and whether or not Leda comes to some sort of divine knowledge due to being violated and also being in union with Zeus. Zeus is identified by the description of ‘brute blood of the air,’ that Zeus is a being that is physical, animal and divine. The readers of Leda and the Swan are left with these two questions and these questions are not dealing with bestiality or rape, proving that the poem Leda and the Swan is more than about bestiality and rape. Ivana Tomic