Leda and the swan by w.b. yeats critical analysis

           LEDA AND THE SWAN   - W.B.YEATS

POEM:-

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

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 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?

INTRODUCTION:-

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was born in Dublin. Yeats is one of the few writers whose greatest works were written after the award of the Nobel Prize.He was an Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms.  Whereas he received the Prize chiefly for his dramatic works, his significance today rests on his lyric achievement. His poetry, especially the volumes The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), Michael Robartes and the Dancer(1921), The Tower (1928), The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933), and Last Poems and Plays (1940), made him one of the outstanding and most influential twentieth-century poets writing in English. His recurrent themes are the contrast of art and life, masks, cyclical theories of life, and the ideal of beauty and ceremony contrasting with the hubbub of modern life. William Butler Yeats died on January 28, 1939.

“Leda and the Swan” is a sonnet that, like the Italian or Petrarchan sonnet, divides into an octave that presents a narrative and a sestet that comments on the narrative. Although the rhyme scheme of the first eight lines follows the typical Shakespearean form (abab, cdcd), the next six lines follow the expected Petrarchan (efg, efg) rhyme scheme.This is the most famous poem in the collection, and its most intense and immediate in terms of imagery. The myth of Ledaand the Swan is a familiar one from Classical mythology. Zeus fell in love with a mortal, Leda the Trojan queen, and raped her while taking on the form of a swan to protect his identity. She became pregnant with Helen of Troy. That Helen was part goddess helps to explain how her beauty brought about the destruction of two civilizations. a poetic technique that Yeats uses liberally in this collection.

ANALYSIS:-

The work of William Butler Yeats, born in 1865, was greatly influenced by the heritage and politics of Ireland. The poem Leda and the Swan by by William Butler Yeats shows how Leda was being raped by Zeus in the form of a wild swan and how this copulation led to the destruction of the city of the Troy. Zeus who is known to be a very wise god, one day infatuated by her beauty after seeing naked body while she was bathing in the river Furatos and raped her.

                                 “  A sudden blow: the great wings beating still

                                     Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed”

Leda couldn’t understand what it was, which came over her body and overpowered her. She staggered to make herself free but all was in vain. The bird caught her nape in his beak and forced her to lie down. He caressed thighs of Leda. He rubbed her breasts with his own body. This union of the human (Leda) with the superhuman (Zeus) led to the birth of the heroes and heroines who created the Athenian civilization. The outcome of the act of this copulation is Helen, who is responsible not only for the Trojan War but also for the death of Agamemnon, who was killed by his wife.  In Ancient Greek mythology – and in Yeast's poem – Leda's rape is taken as an indirect a cause of war. 

                                     “By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,

                                    He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.”

The poet wonders that for a woman like Leda, it was impossible to make herself free from that “feathered glory”. She felt weak against that massive force of Zeus. She started feeling that the bird had already overpowered her and the rape was almost complete. The final question that arises out of the whole episode is whether any positive gains also came out of this sexual act. In another term when Leda was caught up like this, when she was being mastered in this way by the brute blood of the air was she able to take on to herself part of the divine knowledge and power of Zeus before he became indifferent to her? The question “Did she put on his knowledge with his power?” is rhetorical.

                                          “Did she put on his knowledge with his power

                                      Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?”

           “The poet ends the poem by suggesting that Leda didn’t gain the divine knowledge of the god but his violence. From the questions of the second and the last stanzas of the poem, we also see that not only human beings but also gods themselves are a part of a universal (or cosmic) pattern of events, and that they must play their roles as history unfolds. Yeats believed that the divine power come to the human world once in every two thousand years. Once it comes in the form of a violent animal that forcefully rapes some important woman to give birth to children who will bring about the end of the existing culture and civilization. According to Yeats, the birth of Christ was caused by such an indirect spiritual contact of the divine power with Mary in Jerusalem. Similarly, the birth of the most beautiful woman Helen and her sister Clytemnestra in Greece was caused by a violent rape of the Greek queen Leda by the god Zeus in the form of a swan. The sexual intercourse between Leda and Swan is not only resulted in the birth of Helen and Clytemnestra but also the new era of physical violence and destruction of the old Greek culture.

                                       “ And how can body, laid in that white rush,

                                    But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?’’

   The poem can be seen as a criticism of beauty too. Helen is criticized for lack of wisdom. She left her legitimate husband and eloped with Paris, which was so much devastating that it created havoc all around. Similarly, beautiful Clytemnestra killed her own husband. It is an act which could never be forgiven. Both women had beauty but no knowledge at all. Yeats criticizes a beauty where there is a lack of wisdom. Beauty without knowledge can be devastating and the above poem serves the same example.Yeats expects his readers to recognize as archetypal the encounter between mortal woman and godhead. A gentler version of Leda’s visit from the swan, after all, is the beginning of Christianity. Each event, for Yeats, constitutes the annunciation of a great cycle of history. As the impregnation of Mary by the Holy Spirit sets in motion the Christian era, so does Leda’s union with the swan set in motion the heroic age. In conceiving the beautiful Helen of Troy and the vengeful Clytemnestra, Leda conceives love, war--even the evolution of justice. Her encounter with Zeus is the cultural genesis more fully chronicled in Homer’s ILIAD and Aeschylus’ ORESTEIA.

To contain these ideas in a sonnet--a form requiring maximum economy of expression--is a challenge that the poet meets with great resourcefulness. For example, he artfully casts his account of the sexual consummation in language at once prophetic of the Trojan War and suggestive of defloration and orgasm:

                   “The broken wall, the burning roof and tower.

                     And Agamemnon dead.  Being so caught up,”

 The full stop in line 11, along with the typographical break, represents the termination of sexual activity and the onset of post-coital lassitude (brilliantly captured in the half-rhyme of “up” and “drop”). The poem’s energies seem to flag with the sated swan’s.

The poem can be seen as a criticism of beauty too. Helen is criticized for lack of wisdom. She left her legitimate husband and eloped with Paris, which was so much devastating that it created havoc all around. Similarly, beautiful Clytemnestra killed her own husband. It is an act which could never be forgiven. Both women had beauty but no knowledge at all. Yeats criticizes a beauty where there is a lack of wisdom. Beauty without knowledge can be devastating and the above poem serves the same example.

CONCLUSION:-

         “ Mortality of the self versus immortality of the swan species: ‘And now            my heart is sore… Their hearts have not grown old’’  [Wild Swans]

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.