Yeats - Second Coming, Leda and the Swan

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

GYRE: a ring or circle; a circular course or motion

SPIRITUS MUNDI: collective spirit of mankind

My favorite lines:

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold"

"The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/the best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity."

LEDA AND THE SWAN

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By his 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?
How can anybody, 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?

Sparknotes: http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/yeats/section7.rhtml

FORM: "Leda and the Swan" is a sonnet, a traditional fourteen-line poem in iambic pentameter. The structure of this sonnet is Petrarchan with a clear separation between the first eight lines (the "octave") and the final six (the "sestet"), the dividing line being the moment of ejaculation--the "shudder in the loins." The rhyme scheme of the sonnet is ABAB CDCD EFGEFG.

Based on the myth of Leda and Zeus in swan form, the poem explores the rape of the woman by the swan. This poem relates to other pieces of mythology: Leda inevitably gives birth to Clytemnestra and Helen and Castor and Polydeuces. Eventually, this leads to the Trojan War, with Menelaus' wife Helen's 'abduction.' Aeschylus writes about the cursed house of Atreus, which chronicles the eventual death of Agamemnon by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus—Agamemnon sacrificed Iphigenia. Orestes killed his mother Clytemnestra and her lover, and the Furies tried to drive him insane. The jury is split on the trial over his guilt; Athena decides in his favor.