Leda and the Swan
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

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?

Comments by Ira Maine, Poetry Editor

Zeus, the most powerful of the Greek gods, had the habit of straying from the nuptial bed.
He is particularly taken with Leda, wife to Tyndareus, King of Sparta.
Taking the form of a swan, and pursued by an eagle, he seeks refuge in Leda’s arms, whom he promptly ravishes.
Leda’s union  with Zeus creates, or in Yeat’s words,’engenders’, Helen, Castor and Pollux, and Clytemnestra.
Helen is Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman in the world, over whom the Trojan wars will be fought.
Clytemnestra, will be wife to Agamemnon, King of Mycenae, who declares war on Troy, and she will have him murdered.
Castor and Pollux, twin brothers, play an essential role in the Trojan Wars and become the constellation Gemini.
So, Yeat’s poem observes that Zeus’ rape of Leda literally creates the Trojan Wars.

‘A shudder in the loins engenders there
ZEUS’ ORGASM CREATES  A FUTURE WHERE

The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
TROY IS DESTROYED AND BURNING,

And Agamemnon dead…’
THE KING OF MYCENAE IS MURDERED.

Briefly, Helen is married to Menelaus, Agamemnon’s brother.  Paris falls in love with Helen and spirits her off to Troy.  Enraged by this insult to his brother and his kingship, Agamemnon demands she be returned.  His demands are not met so he goes to war with Troy.
While Agamemnon is at war, his wife, Clytemnestra is carrying on with Aegisthus.  When Agamemnon returns from the war he is murdered either by his wife, her lover, or as a joint enterprise.
Finally, Yeats leaves a question hanging …

‘…did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?’

Note here that Yeats does not say ‘wisdom’; the word he uses is ‘knowledge’.
In other words, ‘…so mastered by the brute blood of the air..’ she perhaps did not, or could not bring anything of herself to her offspring.  Everything her children became was the result of her, a mortal, being ‘mastered’ by a god, by THE god, Zeus.  Zeus knew, perhaps, what the future required, and created it through Leda.

Wisdom might have decided against this course.  Mere ‘knowledge’ of what the future requires singularly fails to provide one with the wisdom to prevent it.

IRA MAINE, Poetry Editor