![]() ![]() 5-6 contrast dramatically with the masses of open vowels: “How can those terri fied vague fingers push/ The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?” These lines evoke the struggle between god and mortal in terms that stress the combination of decisive violence and feathery vagueness. Other sound qualities link semantic and phonemic patterns, as in the second quatrain, where the hard consonants in ll. ![]() Rhyme is regular, with only one falling rhyme (tower/ power) and only the slightest vowel difference (up/drop). As William Wordsworth famously noted, in a sonnet on the sonnet, “nuns fret not at their convent's narrow rooms /and hermits are contented with their cells.” The sonnet form affords unsuspected expansion of thought and feeling, and this is nowhere more evident than in Yeats's “Leda,” which adheres strictly to the conventions of the form. It derives its power largely by virtue of the Formal limits within which it articulates its meaning. Though the legend of Leda and Zeus overshadows any political point Yeats tried to make, the poem retains a powerfully mythologized vision of violent historical transformation. ![]() William Butler Yeats's “Leda and the Swan” was originally published in response to a request for a political poem. Structuralism and Formalism * New Criticism * Gender and Sexuality The Blackwell Guide to Literary Theory - Gregory Castle 2007 William Butler Yeats, “Leda and the Swan” Reading with Literary Theory ![]()
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