YEATS’S POETRY
William
Butler Yeats
“Leda and the Swan”
Summary
The speaker retells a story from
Greek mythology, the rape of the girl Leda by the god Zeus, who had assumed the
form of a swan. Leda felt a sudden blow, with the “great wings” of the swan still
beating above her. Her thighs were caressed by “the dark webs,” and the nape of
her neck was caught in his bill; he held “her helpless breast upon his breast.”
How, the speaker asks, could Leda’s “terrified vague fingers” push the
feathered glory of the swan from between her thighs? And how could her body
help but feel “the strange heart beating where it lies”? A shudder in the loins
engenders “The broken wall, the burning roof and tower, and Agamemnon dead.”
The speaker wonders whether Leda, caught up by the swan and “mastered by the
brute blood of the air,” assumed his knowledge as well as his power “Before the
indifferent beak could let her drop.”
Form
“Leda and the Swan” is a sonnet, a traditional fourteen-line
poem in iambic pentameter. The structure of this sonnet is Petrarchan with a
clear separation between the first eight lines (the “octave”) and the final six
(the “sestet”), the dividing line being the moment of ejaculation—the “shudder
in the loins.” The rhyme scheme of the sonnet is ABAB CDCD EFGEFG.
Commentary
Like “The Second Coming,” “Leda and the Swan” describes a
moment that represented a change of era in Yeats’s historical model of gyres,
which he offers in A Vision, his mystical theory of the universe.
But where “The Second Coming” represents (in Yeats’s conception) the end of
modern history, “Leda and the Swan” represents something like its beginning; as
Yeats understands it, the “history” of Leda is that, raped by the god Zeus in
the form of a swan, she laid eggs, which hatched into Clytemnestra and Helen
and the war-gods Castor and Polydeuces—and thereby brought about the Trojan War
(“The broken wall, the burning roof and tower, / And Agamemnon dead”). The
details of the story of the Trojan War are quite elaborate: briefly, the Greek
Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, was kidnapped by the Trojans, so
the Greeks besieged the city of Troy; after the war, Clytemnestra, the wife of
the Greek leader Agamemnon, had her husband murdered. Here, however, it is
important to know only the war’s lasting impact: it brought about the end of
the ancient mythological era and the birth of modern history.
Also like “The Second Coming,” “Leda
and the Swan” is valuable more for its powerful and evocative language—which
manages to imagine vividly such a bizarre phenomenon as a girl’s rape by a
massive swan—than for its place in Yeats’s occult history of the world. As an
aesthetic experience, the sonnet is remarkable; Yeats combines words indicating
powerful action (sudden blow, beating, staggering, beating, shudder, mastered,
burning, mastered) with adjectives and descriptive words that indicate Leda’s
weakness and helplessness (caressed, helpless, terrified, vague, loosening), thus
increasing the sensory impact of the poem.
WORDSWORTH’S POETRY
William
Wordsworth
“The world is too much with us”
Summary
Angrily, the speaker accuses the modern age of
having lost its connection to nature and to everything meaningful: “Getting and
spending, we lay waste our powers: / Little we see in Nature that is ours; / We
have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!” He says that even when the sea
“bares her bosom to the moon” and the winds howl, humanity is still out of
tune, and looks on uncaringly at the spectacle of the storm. The speaker wishes
that he were a pagan raised according to a different vision of the world, so
that, “standing on this pleasant lea,” he might see images of ancient gods
rising from the waves, a sight that would cheer him greatly. He imagines
“Proteus rising from the sea,” and Triton “blowing his wreathed horn.”
Form
This poem is one of the many excellent sonnets
Wordsworth wrote in the early1800s. Sonnets are fourteen-line poetic inventions
written in iambic pentameter. There are several varieties of sonnets; “The
world is too much with us” takes the form of a Petrarchan sonnet, modeled after
the work of Petrarch, an Italian poet of the early Renaissance. A Petrarchan
sonnet is divided into two parts, an octave (the first eight lines of the poem)
and a sestet (the final six lines). The rhyme scheme of a Petrarchan sonnet is
somewhat variable; in this case, the octave follows a rhyme scheme of ABBAABBA,
and the sestet follows a rhyme scheme of CDCDCD. In most Petrarchan sonnets,
the octave proposes a question or an idea that the sestet answers, comments
upon, or criticizes.
Commentary
“The world is too much with us” falls in line
with a number of sonnets written by Wordsworth in the early 1800s that criticize or
admonish what Wordsworth saw as the decadent material cynicism of the time.
This relatively simple poem angrily states that human beings are too
preoccupied with the material (“The world...getting and spending”) and have
lost touch with the spiritual and with nature. In the sestet, the speaker
dramatically proposes an impossible personal solution to his problem—he wishes
he could have been raised as a pagan, so he could still see ancient gods in the
actions of nature and thereby gain spiritual solace. His thunderous “Great
God!” indicates the extremity of his wish—in Christian England, one did not
often wish to be a pagan.
On the whole, this sonnet offers an angry
summation of the familiar Wordsworthian theme of communion with nature, and
states precisely how far the early nineteenth century was from living out the
Wordsworthian ideal. The sonnet is important for its rhetorical force (it shows
Wordsworth’s increasing confidence with language as an implement of dramatic
power, sweeping the wind and the sea up like flowers in a bouquet), and for
being representative of other poems in the Wordsworth canon—notably “London, 1802,” in which the
speaker dreams of bringing back the dead poet John Milton to save his decadent
era.
M. H
