Erotic Entrapment

While the Greek myth upon which Yeats based “Leda and the Swan” supposed Zeus to be all-powerful, leaving Leda little possibility of fighting off the assault, Yeats’s interpretation is more modern. In “Leda and the Swan,” he rewrites the story as a Petrarchan sonnet – traditionally a form of love poem – to explain Leda’s entrapment by way of lust and eros. Yeats thus operates from a modern worldview in which the power of the gods has been transferred back to human agents, but explains the impossibility of Leda’s resistance in terms of seduction.

The first stanza’s highlights the erotic nature of Leda’s entrapment by Zeus. Referring to Leda’s “thighs caressed” by the swan’s “dark webs” (3) puns on the quality of ensnarement in this sexual touch. Meanwhile, the description of her “nape caught in his bill” (3) evokes both the state...