Summary

The poem opens with the image of a swan attacking the Spartan queen Leda. This swan is actually Zeus, who has taken the form of the bird in order to lie with Leda. Zeus holds Leda to him while his wings flap overhead. He grasps her neck in his bill while his webbed feet brush her thighs. The speaker rhetorically asks how Leda’s scared and unsure fingers could drive the god’s feathered form from between her legs, and how could she help but feel his heart beating against her chest.

Zeus ejaculates into Leda’s womb, conceiving Helen, the woman whose beauty will mobilize the fall of Troy and the death of Agamemnon at the end of the Trojan War. The speaker wonders whether, in the moment of her savage rape, Leda was able to take on the omniscience of Zeus which...