Our exploration of the world of the sonnet began in twentieth century Ireland, and it’s to Ireland we return as we draw to a close. W. B. Yeats (1865 – 1939), probably the greatest Irish poet ever and one of the very best English-language poets, wrote this sonnet in the 1920s as the world struggled with economic crisis and political convulsion (so not unlike our own times.)
For Yeats, worldly crisis was a pale reflection of violent patterns in a spiritual or archetypal universe that could be accessed through poetry, myth and symbol. Here he borrows from the ancient Greek myth of the rape of Leda by Zeus in the form of a swan.
If you can read past the overwrought mythic imagery, you’ll see a master architect at work. ‘A sudden blow’ is just that, a sharp rap to open the poem, a brief pause, then the strangeness of the great wings beating ‘still.’ (How can they be still if they’re beating? Oh, he means ‘still’ as in ‘continuing’; but he also means ‘still’, after all this time since the mythic event; and a movement in a myth is real, and not, happening and frozen in time…)
The octet divided into two stanzas, the sestet held up by the division of the third line into two (mimicking the poor girl held aloft by the brutal bird-god, while Troy falls in an instant.) And then the ‘drop’ to an ending that doesn’t even try to match the intensity of the rest of the poem.
Is this what makes the simple fourteen-liner, with a few simple rules, such a versatile instrument? Change pitch, or colour, and the slightest structural variation seems to magnify and resonate. This is one of the greats…
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?