Leda and the Swan
A sudden blow, the great wings still beating above the staggering girl, her nape caught in his bill and her thighs held by the dark webs. Fourteen lines take in the whole coupling of a Spartan queen with a god in swan's form, then open onto what it engenders: the broken wall, the burning roof and tower, and Agamemnon dead. Yeats wrote it for a political review at George Russell's request and found that the politics had gone out of it as the bird and the lady took over.
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Lineage
- alludes to ↑ The Iliad
- alludes to ↑ The Oresteia
Attributes
Genre
Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
Plot structure
Symbol / motif
Conflict
Culture / tradition
Closest analogues
- 49% · 8 shared
- 48% · 10 shared
- 46% · 6 shared
- 43% · 8 shared
- 43% · 8 shared
- 41% · 9 shared