[lit-ideas] Re: Camille on Leda, on a rainy Tuesday
- From: "Mike Geary" <atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 12 Apr 2005 19:50:57 -0500
Great poem, that. But Camille, damn, she just won't stop.
Mike Geary
Memphis
----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert Paul" <robert.paul@xxxxxxxx>
To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, April 12, 2005 4:31 PM
Subject: [lit-ideas] Camille on Leda, on a rainy Tuesday
> Today's poem [from Knopf's poem of the day for Poetry Month] is "Leda
> and the Swan" by William Butler Yeats appears below, with commentary by
> Camille Paglia from her new book, BREAK, BLOW, BURN--just released from
> Pantheon Books.
>
> As usual, additional links follow the text, including the
> official Web site for BREAK, BLOW, BURN, where Paglia proffers
> additional lists of her cultural favorites, from sculpture to scandal.
> There you can also find more excepts and Paglia's spring tour
> schedule.
>
> ************************************************
> Chapter Twenty-two
>
> William Butler Yeats
>
> 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?
>
>
> The theme of "Leda and the Swan," as of "The Second Coming," is the
> tragedy of history. Once again, a Yeats poem opens with a predatory
> bird, which now turns its violence against the human. In form, "Leda" is
> a rhyming sonnet that seems to have been physically traumatized. The
> first two quatrains float free, while the third section is cleft
> crosswise, its final segment dangling precariously, like Leda just
> before the swan drops her.
>
> "A sudden blow": Zeus, the amorous king of the gods, swoops down in
> disguise from Olympus to take his pleasure, but the girl he targets
> experiences his desire as assault and battery. The poem begins with
> Metaphysical abruptness and rapidly unfolds in the present tense,
> drawing us into the scene. Like Leda, we are disoriented by a welter
> of sensory impressions, conveyed by multiplying participles
> ("beating," "staggering," "caressed," "caught") before we reach the
> clarifying subject ("He") in the fourth line. The myth of Leda and the
> swan was a popular romantic theme in Renaissance art (Leonardo and
> Michelangelo painted it), but the tale was treated as a charming,
> pastoral idyll and rarely if ever shown from the victim's point of
> view. In Yeats's version, womanizing is not a titillating sport but a
> ruthless expression of the will to power.
>
> Despite their decorative association with delicacy and grace, swans
> are fierce and formidable creatures, as Yeats surely observed (he
> titled a 1919 book of poems "The Wild Swans at Coole"). The swan
> overwhelms and immobilizes Leda, "helpless" amid a grotesque
> profusion of wings and paddled feet (4). The swan seems both spidery
> ("dark webs") and serpentine, as he twists his long neck around to
> clamp her nape in his bill and pin their bodies together (3). "How can
> those terrified vague fingers push / The feathered glory from her
> loosening thighs?" (5-6). She is weak, confused, and perhaps blinded by
> a burst of divine light ("glory"). The phrase "loosening thighs" is
> ambiguous and provocative: have her strained muscles gone slack, or is
> there awakening complicity on her part? As with the earlier "caressed,"
> a gentle stroking amid the commotion, the reader too is being
> seduced--toward voyeurism and away from honor and ethical judgment.
>
> Nearly everything in the first half of the poem is tactile, including
> Leda's alarming sensation of the swan's "strange heart beating" next
> to hers (8). God is an alien beyond human emotions. The "white rush"
> in which Leda's body is "laid" (nestled in fluffy down as well as
> sexually conquered) is the bird's first strike as it forces past her
> feeble resistance, but it also describes Zeus's ecstatic ejaculation
> (7). While male swans (cobs) do have a small retractable penis, the
> coitus here seems to be of a god in incomplete metamorphosis: his own
> penis may remain magically intact.
>
> But this is only one episode in an epic saga. Zeus has a purpose, and
> Leda is his instrument. "A shudder in the loins engenders there / The
> broken wall, the burning roof and tower / And Agamemnon dead" (9-11).
> The "shudder in the loins" is his pleasure and her fear. Impregnated,
> she will give birth to the entire classical era. From Leda's egg will
> hatch Helen and Clytemnestra, the sister femmes fatales. Faithless
> Helen will trigger the ten-year Trojan War, inspiring Homer's "Iliad"
> and "Odyssey." Clytemnestra will slaughter her husband, Agamemnon,
> commander in chief of the Greek forces, and be murdered in turn by
> their vengeful son, Orestes. Aeschylus's trilogy about these events, the
> "Oresteia," was the first great work of Western drama.
>
> Yeats portrayed Western culture as inseminated with treachery and
> violence from the start. The rape of Leda begins a chain of disasters
> that will continue to his own day. "The broken wall, the burning roof
> and tower" apply to all wars but show ravaged Troy in flames as well
> as the victorious Greek signal fires leaping from peak to peak to
> Argos (the first scene in the "Oresteia"). The burning tower also
> suggests Zeus's raging phallic aggression, just as the "broken wall"
> is Leda's violation and defloration. (Though she was already married
> to a king, Yeats treats Leda as a virginal, undefended maiden.)
>
> The poem roots the constructions of civilization in the convulsive
> "loins," the gut or viscera from which surge driving, irrational
> ambitions and great achievements. But Yeats shows the latter only in
> decline and fall: "Agamemnon dead" is an emblem of annihilated male
> authority and pride. While Troy still burns, we eerily see him, as if
> by time-lapse photography, already slain on the day of his triumphant
> homecoming. He lies toppled like Shelley's pharaoh. In the time frame
> of the sonnet's composition, "Agamemnon dead" also refers to the
> failure of state and military leadership in World War I, with
> its strategic blunders and massive waste of life. The age of heroes is
> over.
>
> Because of its vast historical vision and agonizing pantomime of
> passion and conflict, "Leda and the Swan" can justifiably be
> considered the greatest poem of the twentieth century. It reflects the
> disillusionment of European and North American artists and
> intellectuals with the West, whose buoyant confidence in its own moral
> superiority and technological progress had been shattered by the Great
> War, as it was then called. The "sudden blow" that opens the poem
> reproduces the shock of events, numbing and destabilizing. The poet
> wonders whether Leda, "being so caught up" in her brief, bruising
> encounter with God, gained "knowledge" of the meaning of history
> (12-14). Did her penetration by Zeus's "power" give her mental
> penetration? Or was she, like us, mired in earthly limitation? She
> says nothing.
>
> Neither Zeus nor Leda is named in the text itself, so that the scene
> becomes archetypal: the poem records a pivotal moment of contact
> between humanity and divinity. The exchange is painfully one-sided but
> revelatory: "mastered by the brute blood of the air," Leda sees God
> for what he is--a sadistic marauder, as tarnished as a fallen angel
> (13). Sated, the swan lets her "drop" from his "indifferent beak," a
> curt phrase that accentuates her cumbersome materiality, her reduction
> to a thing and trophy, as well as his cavalier disrespect for his
> own creation (15). Losing interest, God callously discards his toys.
>
> By implication, the poem refers to another commandeering of a
> virgin by a bird-god--the impregnation of a startled Mary by the Holy
> Spirit, depicted as a beam of light or white dove. (Yeats makes the
> Mary parallel explicit in "Two Songs from a Play.") God plays a game
> of hit-and-run--infusing each declining age with ferocious new energy,
> then disappearing again for two thousand years. A fellow Irish writer,
> Samuel Beckett, borrowed Yeats's theme of a capriciously
> self-withholding God for "Waiting for Godot," where vagabonds scrabble
> beneath the blank sky.
>
> The last section of "Leda and the Swan" has a split-level structure,
> mirroring its content. The irregular gash produced by a broken line
> mimics the modern breakdown in religious and cultural traditions--the
> mournful subject of T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" (1922), with its
> fallen idols and disconnected allusions. From this point of view,
> "Agamemnon dead" would be the failure even to recognize the name
> "Agamemnon": classical culture has receded and no longer feeds and
> informs the present. Visually, the last stanza's jagged pattern
> resembles a thunderbolt, Zeus's emblem. Yeats has projected himself
> into Leda's story: he wrote elsewhere, "We who are poets and
> artists...live but for the moment when vision comes to our weariness
> like terrible lightning, in the humility of the brutes" (Per Amica
> Silentia Lunae). Illumination is sporadic, partial, and costly.
> Knowledge is not cumulative but subject to periodic destruction and
> loss, necessitating recovery and revival. Like "The Second Coming,"
> "Leda and the Swan" ends with a question. There is no resolution. All
> human beings, like Leda, are caught up moment by moment in the "white
> rush" of experience. For Yeats, the only salvation is the shapeliness
> and stillness of art.
>
> ************************************************
>
> From BREAK, BLOW, BURN by Camille Paglia. Copyright 2005 by Camille
> Paglia. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of
> Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be
> reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the
> publisher.
>
> ************************************************
>
> Additional links:
>
> Read more about BREAK, BLOW, BURN and additional excerpts:
> http://info.randomhouse.com/cgi-bin21/DM/y/ejDf0DgBPz0Wa0dvx0E7
>
> More about Camille Paglia and her picks for the best in culture:
> http://info.randomhouse.com/cgi-bin21/DM/y/ejDf0DgBPz0Wa0dvx0E7
>
> Camille Paglia will be discussing poetry across the country throughout
> April. Find the Paglia event closest to you at:
> http://info.randomhouse.com/cgi-bin21/DM/y/ejDf0DgBPz0Wa0dvy0E8
>
> Read the rave New York Times review of BREAK, BLOW, BURN:
> http://info.randomhouse.com/cgi-bin21/DM/y/ejDf0DgBPz0Wa0d3i0Ek
>
> Vanity Fair Columnist James Wolcott chooses BREAK, BLOW, BURN as his
> "Hot
> Pick" for the week of 3/13/05 on Topic A With Tina Brown:
> http://info.randomhouse.com/cgi-bin21/DM/y/ejDf0DgBPz0Wa0dvz0EA
>
> Discuss Camille Paglia in the Knopf Poets Forum:
> http://info.randomhouse.com/cgi-bin21/DM/y/ejDf0DgBPz0Wa0dyo0E1
> -----------------------------
>
> Robert Paul
> Reed College
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