Yeats and his Leda
“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”
- William Butler Yeats.
Leda and the Swan was a part of the poetry collection The Tower published in 1928, which William Butler Yeats released after becoming a Nobel laureate. He is one of the rare breeds of poets who improved his quality of writing as he entered his late life. Leda and the Swan is a song that Yeats wrote and rewrote before finally giving it the present shape that we read it in. He released the collection when he was in his early sixties. The subject of the poem is taken from Greek mythology where Zeus is trying to seduce Leda, wife of the Spartan King Tyndareus. This union resulted in the birth of Helen of Troy whose infidelity ignited the Trojan War and the beginning of classical history.
Before indulging in the analysis and explanation of how Yeats used this subject to instil meaning in his poem, at first a quick look should be taken at the writing structure of the poem. There is something vividly unsettling about the way it has been written. The sonnet feels hijacked, the lines are twisted everywhere and torn apart. Similar to Dr Frankenstein it feels like Yeats had surgically attached the Shakespearean sonnet with its first two quatrains featuring an ABAB rhyme scheme and the Petrarchan sonnet with an EFGEFG rhyme scheme which also includes unnerving rhyme slant “up” and “drop” in the last lines robbing the final moment of an auditory closure. Most notable of all is line eleven which appears slashed and broken in two leaving the final three lines just dangling there exactly like Leida herself in the indifferent beak of the Swan. In doing this Yeats commits a kind of violence on the sonnet form and this is done in an attempt to augment the violent content of his work. Sonnets, in general especially Shakespearean sonnets are traditionally about the greatness of love, and yet here Yeats uses the form to describe what can be considered the exact opposite; an act of violent molestation. If the later versions of this song are to be analyzed then it can be observed that Yeats turned up the volume on this violence. For example, in one version the poem begins with- “A rush, a sudden wheel, hovering still,/ The bird descends, her frail thighs pressed/ By webbed toes, and all-powerful bill/ Has laid her helpless breast upon his breast. Now, this early version almost assumes ladies acquiescence to the advances of the god. In the later version beginning with a shock of a sudden blow, Zeus’s molestation is intensely emphasized, and emphasized still is Leida and the reader’s disorientation. The next part of the sentence states “the great wings beating still” presents an ambiguity in the reader’s mind. How can the wings be bearing when they are still? This is the question that hovers in the mind of the reader and on the other hand if Yeats meant that the wings are still beating then that means the rape has already begun while the swan is still in the air. In this version, the girl is “staggering” and her thighs are “caressed”; a word that disturbs us by commingling the erotic with the vicious, something that is a very common practice of Yeats in his poetry; “caressed/ By the dark web” gives the readers a sense of how big the bird is as not only the toes but the webs between the toes are what caressing her. It should be noted here that the both first and the second lines end with enjambment pulling the readers awkwardly through the verse. It is not until the last line that we get the subject “He” as if everything was happening so fast that Leda could not find her bearing until the gruesome act was already underway. The first quatrain of the poem is disturbing in extreme setting the scene from Leda’s point of view. After this, we have the second quatrain which is made up of two rhetorical questions both asking the same thing- what could Leda do against the terrifying and awesome power of the god? How can she possibly do anything but feel her strange heartbeat? These questions can be read in two ways- one is rhetorical which is to say she cannot do anything and such is the tragedy of the poem, but it can be said that Yeats invites us to read them in the literal sense which is to say what can she do? After the first two verses come to the volta- a term where the sonnet turns and the questions of the events in the first lines are answered, in this case, after shutter referring to both points as ejaculation and latest fear we have the poet examining the consequences of the rape and they are far reachable. “The broken wall, the burning roof and tower” all intimate that the rape of Leda not only caused but ensured the eventual destruction of Troy and the rise of Greece and Western history, a history that was born out of rape, war and murder and “Agamemnon dead”.
Here goes Yeats’ alteration of the mythological history. As the story goes Leda laid two eggs one bore Helen and Pollux, demigods- the children of Zeus and the other bore Castor and Clytemnestra- children of Leda’s mortal husband Tyndareus who she laid with the same night. By citing that Agamemnon was famously killed by his wife Clytemnestra as among the faded ramification of the rape Yeats demonstrates the full effect of the trauma and by doing this he reaches into the history of art as well, because it calls to Troy and the dead of Agememnom brings to mind Homer’s Illiad, the pinnacle of the epic form and Aeschylus’s play The Oresteia, the first great work of western drama. All this is done in eleven words without even mentioning the continued sexual overtones and then the poem is concluded with one final question- “Did she put on his knowledge with his power/ Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?”. To understand this and the poem in a larger context, knowledge about Yeats and his way of thinking from his early life should be considered.
Yeats has always been drawn to mysticism, astrology, the supernatural, and the occult. In middle age, he developed his complex metaphysical and cosmic system which was laid out in extreme detail in a book called A Vision where one of the key ideas was that history was made up into gyres or cycles of about 2000 years alternating between the ages of spirituality and secularism. Each cycle reaches the peak of its excellence in the exact middle and then it is replaced by the new one. This idea is explored in his poem The Second Coming. Here Yeats identified with his own time, our time as the end of the religious cycle of Christianity, and envisioned the start of a new unknown cycle of secularism by the coming of a great beast. The last time such a cycle began is the subject of Leda and the Swan. The rape of Leda by Zeus signals the start of the Classical era around 2000 BC in each the divine cists the earth and leaves the seeds of the history that is to come. This is the key to Yeats’ question, did Leda put the knowledge with his power? Did Leda glimpse the future that was to come? Did she know about the cycle she was creating for the indifferent God that flew away? In some way, he suggests that the shape of the things to come is contained in its origin but can it be discerned by humans? That is the question. Through all this, Yeats wanted to have a unified system in the first place because it was from this many symbols of unity he was able to extra his most powerful poetry having that sliding matrix of meaning working so tightly and intricately woven, pulling one string, evoking one symbol, laying one idea to the form and meter of a sonnet would make the rest of the web light up like a Christmas tree signifying a complexity that invites the reader into several simultaneous interpretations, By situating the reader at the fulcrum of the history equal to our own we are forced to look at what we are coming out of and what we are heading toward? A relevant question for any age, particularly Yeats’ own when the trauma of World War I must have come like a sudden blow. By posing questions of resistance to this brutal act but showing no resistance on the part later even enjoyment. The readers themselves are called on to imagine how we resist oppression and the nature of resistance from both as a feminist point of view and a political one by depicting an encounter with the divine so savagely we are asked to examine the price of inspiration and by posing questions without giving power- the knowledge and the power of poetry itself is called in question. All this represents unity in the poetry of Yeats. And these things are compressed to Yates’ Leda and The Swan. Spring load triggered by an image or a pun or a slant rhyme, that so much could be packed into a poem of 14 lines and 113 words is a testament to both Yeats and the continuing importance of Poetry. All that is left is to pull one string and see what sublime network of meanings lights up.
Comments
Post a Comment