[lit-ideas] Camille on Leda, on a rainy Tuesday
- From: Robert Paul <robert.paul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 12 Apr 2005 14:31:44 -0700
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.
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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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