Beauty and Violence: Placing the Emotions of "Leda and the Swan" in Political and Historical Context Hunshari College

William Butler Yeats was an Irish Nationalist who wrote poetry all his life. His poems had themes of beauty and violence, Maud Gonne and executed freedom fighters. He had philosophies about changing times and the influence of deities, spirits and the phases of the supernatural world upon our lives. (Anon. 2018) Bringing many of these aspects together is, perhaps his most disturbing poem, Leda and the Swan. It chronicles the gruesome act of a swan, the disguised Zeus, raping Leda, a Greek woman. This essay will first structurally analyse the sonnet, before exposing the content of the poem from the perspective of the contrast of beauty and violence interpreted. Evidence from both history and the poem will be supplied to substantiate the theory as Yeats is, in essence, retelling an old Greek myth with ties to real history once again.

It was not common for Yeats to write sonnets, but Leda and the Swan is Patrician Sonnet, but it is unusual seeing as the octave is divided into two stanzas and the sixain has a split in it as well. (Anon. 2018) There is a strange visual divide between ‘And Agamemnon dead.’ and ‘Being so caught up,’ in line 11. (Yeats, 1939) The first stanza sets the scene physically and the second describes in...