Leda’s Vision
William Butler Yeats, in his poem “Leda and the Swan,” ponders cosmic grandeur and presupposes first, that God exists; second, God is powerful and violent; and third, God is indifferent and distant to human sufferings. Upon these presumptions, unlike the Romantics who had revered divinity, Yeats poignantly and daringly questions Zeus’s offense to mankind. Zeus’s rape of Leda unseals the next “gyre” – a cycle of history that must spiral up the expanse of a given time. What the poet probes in this poem is whether Leda had known what lied within this gyre (two millennium) that entails the birth of Helen (of Troy) and Cytemnestra (wife of Agamemnon); and the subsequent destruction of early Greek civilization. Had Leda only been aware of the “sudden blow” (1) or had her intelligence been quickened by God’s the assault? “Did she put on his knowledge with his power” to realize the meaning and purpose of her participation in divine procreation (2110)?
The author writes this sonnet on the premise that God exists and that he intervenes in human events. The very title “Leda and the Swan” predicates this poem to be one of the mortal and immortal. It is about the relationship of human and divine. Leda is the chosen vessel that is forced to carry the divine seed of Zeus who has been incarnated as a swan. She receives “[the] feathered glory from her loosening thighs” (6) acquiescently.
The first line, “A sudden blow:” (1) opens the tone of this poem as powerful and violent. Yeats’ imagery depicting the violence of rape evokes a mood of unquiet indignation in the reader against the divine. “[The] great wings beating still above the staggering girl…her nape caught in his bill, he holds her helpless breast upon his breast” (1-4). “How can those terrified vague fingers push” (5) her assailant away? Prodigious is the God’s insemination of the womb of Leda that symbolically unfolds a new generation of violence, fire, and death with the ensuing birth of two daughters, Helen and Clytemnestra. “A shudder in the loins engenders there the broken wall, the burning roof and tower and Agamemnon dead” (9-10).
Leda has no doubt that Zeus is an uncaring God. As her violated, traumatized, and feeble body hangs loosely in the air seized by the “indifferent beak,” (14) Leda fears that this beast might carelessly drop her to death. However, the omniscient being knows that successful ushering of a new era requires Leda’s pulse to be intact. Killing her would mar his divine purpose. “Being so caught up, so mastered by the brute blood of the air,” Leda’s fearful mind attempts to comprehend the incomprehensible, the divinity.
In the last stanza, Yeats moves away from the details of bizarre physicality of the rape and enters an abstract realm of analogy to implicitly connect this violent event to a cosmic order that is hostile to mankind. In the authors mind, the past, present, and future, in the context of history, are in concordance with divine stratagem to have mankind suffer. He is pained to come to an understanding of the brutal and indifferent God whom we, the mortals, are subjects to. He believes, just as Leda had been caught in this cosmic historical pattern, he and all mortals are mere puppets of the deities.
In this poem, Yeats uncovers the face of a cruel and aloof God he has discovered, but he further dramatizes this finding by throwing an unsettling question to his readers: In physical union with the divine, had Leda been enlightened with a foreknowledge of the future? Had she known the significance of her terrible rape and what the future held for her offspring?
To infer from the overtones of the previous stanzas, she had been quickened by the sexual-union with Zeus and received foresight pertaining to the horrific fate of her descendants. Leda, “[being] so caught up, so mastered “ by Zeus, not only literally sees what is beneath her, but symbolically sees what history is laid out underneath “the brute blood of the air” (11-12). When she is held in the air by the beast, the panoramic view of the two thousand years of future is so gruesome and repugnant that she instinctively fears this “indifferent beak” (14) would inflict the same cruelty on her. She witnesses firsthand the power of the divine – how totally dominating, and heartless it is to its creatures. In fact, the only metaphorical significance of the swan lifting her up in the air is to impart her a portion of its divine, uplifted, prophetic vision of the future.
It is clear that Yeats purposely describes God in this poem to be omnipotent and omniscient, allusively parallel to Jehovah. Mary knew that Jesus was in her womb, so must have Leda known that Helen and Clytemnestra were in her womb. Mary knew what role Jesus would play, so must have Leda known what role her two daughters would play in the coming years of Greek civilization. Just as Mary had no power over this matter, Leda had no power over the imminent future. However, Leda had to have been affected by an intimate union with the divine. If not, then, Yeats has failed as a poet for not giving sufficient merit to the God figure (Zeus) to effectively intensify his poem’s blasphemous message to its readers.
“Leda and the Swan,” is a stark contrast to the traditions of Romanticism not in its imaginativeness but in its explicit condemnation of divinity. Romantic writers such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, show great yearning to be in union with the divine and considers it to be a blessed ecstasy. Contrarily, Yeats depicts Leda’s union with the divine to be a curse that inaugurates a series of historical events that culminate in destruction and chaos for helpless humans.
Wordsworth and Coleridge had seen beauty and mystery in the universe, but Yeats sees desolation and a clear cosmic scheme that he exposes as a very disturbing truth. Wordsworth, in his poem “The Tables Turned,” says, “Let Nature be your Teacher” (16). Also in his poem “Tintern Abbey,” he reveres nature to be “the anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, the guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul of all my moral being” (109-111). Likewise, Coleridge, in his poem “The Eolian Harp” describes nature to be mysterious “as twilight…when they at eve voyage on gentle gales from Fairy-Land…which meets all motion and becomes its soul, a light in sound, a sound-like power in light” (21-27). Yeats, however, sees a more threatening mystery in nature. If the grandeur of the universe had been an ineffable inspiration to Romantics, then now, Yeats has deciphered that mystical aura to be nothing more than a cruel and an aloof God who dictates human events and cycles with the employment of innocent mortal agents to fulfill his cosmic plans.
Yeats, in his poem “Leda and the Swan,” maligns divinity. He purposely uses primitive Greek mythology to hypothetically argue his blasphemous view of the deity. Though he depicts God to be omnipotent and omniscient, his primary mission in this poem is to disclose God’s lack of empathy towards human sufferings. By implying that Zeus’s rape of Leda had ushered a cycle of history that had been devastating to Greek civilization, he not only implants in the reader a resentment against God but also instills hopelessness in life of the mankind that is fated by God’s control. Leda and the Swan’s obscene sexual imagery by the author desecrates what had been holy to the Romantics – the mystical union they had sought with the nature, the divine. That Leda had known the historical significance of her divine assault can be assessed by the subtle hints throughout the poem. After all, how can a supreme God touch a mortal without affecting the one being touched by him? What merit does God deserve as a divine figure if his direct contact with a human leaves no significant trace?
JC's Mental Portal 