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The form of a sonnet
Leda and the Swan
The poem begins like an English sonnet - three quatrains and a couplet with the quatrains rhyming abab with a rhyming couplet
BUT
Yeats includes a variation (he messes with the form) switches to Petrarchan (Italian) sonnect after the second quatrain with a set of tercets that make up a sestet rhyming cde cde.
caesura - pause
Leda and the Swan, 16th century, Philadelphia Museum of Art, USA
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?
Leda and the Swan
split
Leda and the Swan,
Cesare da Sesto, 1515-1520.
According to myth, Leda was approached by the god Zeus while he was masquerading as a swan. Zeus made love to Leda (versions suggest she was raped) in the form of the swan.
The union between Leda has influenced both the arts and mythology.
Leda and the Swan, attributed to
Il Sodoma, c. 1510–15.
Galleria Borghese, Rome.
Links to Greek Mythology
Leda was important as a wife and mother. In legend, she was the wife of Tyndareus (a king of Sparta).
Leonardo da Vinci
Spiridon Leda, Francesco Melzi? c. 1515.
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence
Possible connections between other poems include:
Leda and the Swan - recounts the rape
Allusion in The Wild Swans at Coole
Among School Children - Stanza II (the opening line) 'I dream of a Ledaean body...that changed some childish day to tragedy... or else, to alter Plato's parable...
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