Leda and the Swan

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1924

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

The Cyclical Nature of Violence

Yeats’s poem is built around the theme that singular acts of violence can lead to violence on a much wider and larger scale, creating cycles of violence and trauma. While other poets and artists over the centuries have sometimes depicted the encounter between Leda and Zeus as a consensual act of seduction (See: Literary Context), Yeats’s speaker is explicit in describing rape. The poem’s first words are “A sudden blow” (Line 1), stressing both the unexpectedness of the encounter (since it is “sudden”) and the immediate violence in Zeus’s approach—it is a forceful “blow” that leaves her “staggering” (Line 2), not the welcome overtures of a lover. This explicit violence pervades the encounter, with Leda “helpless” (Line 4) beneath the swan’s powerful advances, “terrified” (Line 5) in her futile resistance, and “caught up” (Line 12) and “mastered” (Line 13) by the swan against her will. The encounter is therefore an unambiguous violence.

In the final stanza, the speaker alludes to what will happen due to this rape, drawing a clear causality from Leda’s conception of Helen to the devastation of the Trojan War:

A shudder in the loins engenders there

The broken wall, the burning roof and tower

And Agamemnon dead” (Lines 9-11).

Just as Leda has been overpowered and violated by Zeus, so too will the city of Troy be overpowered and violated by the Greek army led by Helen’s spurned husband, Menelaus, and his brother Agamemnon. Agamemnon’s eventual death at the hands of his wife, Clytemnestra, is briefly alluded to in Line 11 (“And Agamemnon dead”), which speaks to a gender reversal in terms of violence: While Leda is the victim in her encounter with Zeus and powerless beneath his violence, their daughter Helen will be the catalyst for violence during the Trojan War, and the war victims will largely be men. The allusion to Agamemnon’s murder by his wife after his return from the war also suggests that just as violence can lead from individual events to collective ones, so too can it retreat from the collective back to the individual—from private domestic tragedies to the battlefield, and back again.

The Dangers of Beauty and Power

Throughout “Leda and the Swan,” there is an underlying tension between the brutality and inhumanity of the rape and the power and majesty of Zeus in the form of the swan, suggesting a potential dark side to beauty and power. The speaker describes Zeus’s swan form as intimidating in size and appearance, with its “great wings” (Line 1) and “dark webs” (Line 3), and even calls him “the brute blood of the air” (Line 13) in the final stanza, stressing his inhumane violence. Yet the speaker also acknowledges the swan’s strange and even sensual beauty, as when Leda’s “thighs [are] caressed / By the [swan’s] dark webs” (Lines 2-3), or when describing how she is overpowered by the “feathered glory” (Line 6) that is the god. Zeus as a swan is both majestic and yet cruel, divine and yet beastly (both literally and figuratively). Zeus’s apparition as a swan is especially ironic and unsettling, considering that swans are widely seen as symbols of love and fidelity in Western culture, as they mate for life.

This tension between the beauty and power of the swan/Zeus and the base cruelty of the rape also echoes what will cause the Trojan War: the incredible beauty and infidelity of Helen, Zeus and Leda’s daughter. Just like Zeus, Helen is linked to violence in the final stanza, emphasizing once again how even the supposedly divine and beautiful can be dark, destructive, and deadly when its power goes unchecked.

The Cruelty of Fate

Since the swan in “Leda and the Swan” is not an actual bird but Zeus in avian form, the chain of events leading from Leda’s rape to the sack of Troy is infused with the sense of inevitability. In Classical Greek mythology, the relationship between the gods and the force of Fate is somewhat complex, as the gods are both supremely powerful themselves and yet must also bow to the powers of Fate on occasion. Regardless of how much direct control Zeus may have over the events of the Trojan War itself, it is clear in the poem that he is responsible for conceiving Helen of Troy through an act of sexual violence, which leaves Zeus the “prime mover” of the chain of events that leads to the sack of Troy.

However, most unsettling of all is Zeus’s apparent insouciance about the consequences of the rape. Since Leda is “helpless” (Line 4) throughout, she is forced to yield to the swan as both her attacker and as the divine force he actually is. But for Zeus, the encounter is pleasurable and insignificant: He is the “brute blood of the air” (Line 13) who behaves recklessly, and the speaker describes how his “indifferent beak [ . . .] let her drop” (Line 15) after the rape, with “indifferent” emphasizing how little he cares for what has happened. Since Zeus, as king of the gods, possesses divine “knowledge” (Line 14) as well as “power” (Line 14), the speaker hints that he can foresee “The broken wall, the burning roof and tower” (Line 10) that awaits Troy, but that he either chooses to instigate this senseless cycle of violence or must yield to a powerful Fate that has decreed it must be so. Either way, Zeus’s indifference to humanity’s suffering and the continuing misery that will inevitably follow the rape suggests that the gods and Fate are cruel and lawless.