Among School Children. An Irish Airman Foresees his Death. A Prayer for my Daughter. Easter, Sailing to Byzantium. The Lake Isle of Innisfree. The Second Coming. The Song of Wandering Aengus. The Wild Swans at Coole. When You Are Old. LitCharts Teacher Editions. Teach your students to analyze literature like LitCharts does.
Detailed explanations, analysis, and citation info for every important quote on LitCharts. The original text plus a side-by-side modern translation of every Shakespeare play. Sign Up. The ninth line, appropriately enough, ends the description of sex.
There is nowhere else for the poem to go at this point, so Yeats has to develop a new theme. The last six lines of the poem, then, narrate the consequences of the act, both for humanity the Trojan War and for Leda personally the possibility of "putting on" Zeus's knowledge. You might have noticed that "Leda and the Swan" looks a little different than other sonnets. It has three stanzas, and line 11 appears to be broken off into two lines.
As for the three stanzas, that's a perfectly common way of illustrating the internal divisions in the poem. And we think Yeats divides line 11 in order to heighten the drama of Agamemnon being dead and to show how the poem shifts back to Leda's perspective after leaping forward into the future. The poem's meter is a very rough iambic pentameter. In this meter, the most common in English, each line has ten beats, with an unstressed beat followed by an stressed one: "He holds her help -less breast u- pon his breast.
Swans, the story goes, mate for life, so although this overture is unlooked-for, there is a suggestion of its permanence too. Does it suggest that Leda should have learned from her experience with Zeus, and that what follows — the Trojan War, begun because of a woman she brought into the world — is partly her fault?
It remains a baffling question, with no clear answer. As well as giving birth to Helen of Troy, Leda will also conceive Clytemnestra, the wife of Agamemnon; Clytemnestra will later kill her husband, after the Trojan War, for sacrificing their daughter in exchange for fair winds from the gods. When Zeus overcame Leda with his divine power during the moment of his assault, did he also impart foreknowledge of what this event would cause, before — once it was all over — he dropped her, having done what he came to do?
William Butler Yeats is one of the greatest of all Irish poets. His first collection, Crossways , appeared in when he was still in his mid-twenties, and his early poetry bore the clear influence of Romanticism. And yet, at the same time, there is a directness to his work which makes readers feel personally addressed, and situates his work always at one remove from more famous modernist poets such as T.
Eliot and Ezra Pound. Yeats died in Throughout much of his life, a woman named Maud Gonne was his muse. Yeats asked her to marry him several times, but she always refused. She knew she could be of more use to him as a muse than as a wife or lover.
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