Leda and the Swan

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?

Yates received his initial commission to write this sonnet in 1923 from an Irish newspaper, he said that he became obsessed with the metaphor and it went though several major rewrites until it was published in this form around 1928 in a collection of this poetry. The initial thought is that Zeus/Swan is the UK and Leda is Ireland, however the poem interpretation seems to go far beyond this reading.

I really like Nerdwriter's interpretation of the poem.



Following from Nerdwriter's thought about inspiration let me suggest that this poem is about divine inspiration. The sudden blow is the shock of a radically new conception which drags and binds its recipient to itself, much like Yates obsession, A conception who's initial darkness challenges the recipients conventional understanding. Those who are inspired in this way are helpless to fend off their thoughts, and the strangeness of the thought brings forth a new metre in the sonnet.

The orgasmic/erotic effect of inspiration goes beyond its violent power, if its receive can see beyond this power to what is entailed (as in the death of Agamemnon) then knowledge is learn't, but such inspiration is momentary and indifferent to the entailment and quickly lost.