Disclaimer: This post was originally written in Chinese and translated into English by GPT-5.2.
“Leda and the Swan” is a classic poem by the great Irish poet W.B. Yeats. Taking Greek mythology as its source, the poem reinterprets the process in which Zeus, transformed into a swan, seduces and rapes the mortal girl Leda, and from this raises new philosophical reflections, attracting many interpretations by later generations.
“Leda and the Swan” is indeed a masterpiece from the pen of a Nobel Prize–winning author. For nearly a century, popular interpretations of it have borne witness to its classic status; if one can calm down, toy with it carefully, and savor it slowly, one will often be captivated and captured by it. “The beauty of poetry” is nothing else than being worth rereading and worth looking at, able to withstand personal pickiness and the sifting of time. The beauty of “Leda and the Swan” is exactly like this. This article mainly offers a brief discussion from three aspects: “beauty of form, beauty of painting, beauty of implied meaning.”
“Leda and the Swan” first embodies the poem’s “beauty of form.” Here, form mainly refers to the poem’s external structure and its surface-level sound pattern.
This poem basically follows the compositional conventions of the sonnet, adopting an abab cdcd efg efg rhyme scheme. Overall it is smooth and sonorous, with harmonious rhythm, as shown below (the rhyming words at the end of each line have all been given the same bold, underline, and italic treatment to distinguish them):
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?
However, strictly speaking, this poem is a fifteen-line poem. At the line “And Agamemnon dead,” the poet unusually shortens the line length, and almost abruptly adds below it the line “Being so caught up,” creating a sense of rupture. Yet this rupture not only does not damage the expression of the poem’s meaning; it unexpectedly creates a mysterious turning effect within the conventional sonnet norm, naturally leading the reader to an intractable, entangled historical, or even philosophical, perplexity: when a mortal and a god unite, does the mortal, by virtue of the god’s omniscience and omnipotence, also come to possess the god’s knowledge and power?
The “theory of aesthetic sedimentation” is the core proposition of Li Zehou’s aesthetics. He believes that old forms—even forms that, through the evolution of time, have already become highly abstract—can still stimulate aesthetic experience in the hearts of people of later ages because the sense of beauty has been sedimented generation after generation through “activities of beauty,” thereby acquiring social objectivity. But the experience of “beauty” is not fixed and unchanging; it likewise requires innovation and change. This calls for innovation on the basis of already formed aesthetic paradigms, so as to achieve a new sense of beauty brought about by defamiliarization. “Leda and the Swan” adopts the sonnet’s compositional norms in its basic form and rhythm, yet in inheritance it also changes and develops; and this change and development serves the poem’s overall purpose. This is one manifestation of its beauty of form. Another manifestation of the beauty of form in “Leda and the Swan” is as follows: rhythmically, “Leda and the Swan” basically uses iambic pentameter, with five stresses in each line, which makes the poem’s rhythm coordinated. But the first and third lines of the poem have only four stresses (e.g., A sud | den blow: | the great | wings bea | ting still), breaking this rule. This too is intentional on the author’s part, echoing the suddenness and violence of the swan’s rape of Leda, producing a defamiliarizing effect, so that readers, merely in the process of reading the poem aloud, can feel the poem’s line of thought along with the changes in sound, and thus, from the surface of form, experience the deeper content of the lines.
“Leda and the Swan” next embodies the poem’s “beauty of painting.” When Wen Yiduo commented on poetry, he once said that “poetry has three beauties,” namely musical beauty, architectural beauty, and pictorial beauty. Here, “musical beauty” and “architectural beauty” correspond exactly to the “beauty of form” discussed above, while “pictorial beauty” refers to the construction of imagery.
When it comes to “pictorial beauty,” perhaps quite a few people will not accept what I say here, at least believing that a poem depicting scenes of rape and war has no beauty in its visuals at all. This opinion is of course not wrong; intuitive beauty is also one kind of aesthetic experience—how many people would like someone ugly in appearance? But “pictorial beauty” cannot be equated with “visual beauty” or “imagistic beauty.” The former is considered more from the technical side, while the latter is more a direct experience. Poems that pile up beautiful images abound in all times and places, but those that can withstand the test of time are few and far between. That is to say, if one merely lists and cobbles together a pile of beautiful things without any technique, it often only backfires and brings about “aesthetic fatigue.” On the contrary, a work of art rich in technique and expressive power, even if the object it depicts at first glance is not fit for elegant appreciation, may still become a classic. The grim-faced Laocoön (sculpture), the not-very-beautiful The Last Supper (painting), and the brutal imagery of “Leda and the Swan” (poetry) are all examples.
The pictorial beauty of poetry is nothing more than what is embodied in narrative method and diction. Taking “Leda and the Swan” as an example: the poem begins by seizing attention with “A sudden blow” (a sudden gust rising), then depicts how the girl is “in one step” quickly grabbed by the swan’s huge wings and dark webs and brought under bodily control. But the reader must keep reading until the last line of the first stanza—until the appearance of “He”—to understand that this is a rape of a woman by a man. This vividly expresses the cruelty of the rape. Yeats’s method of arousing reader expectation and delaying satisfaction is still used later. For example, in the first half of the third stanza, while describing broken walls and ruins, burning roofs and towers, it is not until the next line that the Trojan War is subtly indicated through Agamemnon—that is, the consequence remotely drawn out by this rape. The first two stanzas first write the process of the swan raping Leda and Leda gradually accepting it, and then extend from the consequences of this union of god and mortal to the final historical, even philosophical reflection. The narration is smooth and natural, without a trace, truly remarkable.
The poem’s narrative method only shows readers the macro-level picture; to make this picture more refined and vivid, it also needs exquisite diction to support it. “Leda and the Swan” has already achieved the level of “weighing every word and polishing every sentence” in this respect. First, the word choice is accurate and distinct: verbs such as beating, staggering, caressed, caught, holds, push, laid, etc.; nouns such as wings, thighs, webs, nape, breast, etc.; and modifiers such as great, above, helpless, terrified, vague, strange, etc.—all are just right, strongly visual, and able to withstand scrutiny. Second, the ingenious combination of some words creates a distinctive ambiguity, expressing rich connotations. The best example in this regard is “the great wings beating still.” Beating means flapping, while still here can be understood as either “motionless” or “still/yet”; but in any case, both meanings can express the rape image of the swan’s sudden appearance with wings beating, its attack and control of Leda, while the huge wings are still hanging in the air flapping. When Qian Zhongshu discussed how “Li Sao” can mean both “suffering sorrow” and “leaving sorrow,” the polysemy of still here accords with what he called “the poem’s emptiness containing two meanings.” Finally, the borrowing and substitution of images is also a reason for the success of “Leda and the Swan.” Here, borrowing refers to the poem’s borrowing of a story on the same theme from Greek mythology, while substitution is, for instance, using Agamemnon to stand for the Trojan War. This borrowing and substitution are ingenious, serving the conveyance of the poem’s main purpose.
The poem’s beauty of form and beauty of painting can only, in the end, be transformed into “beauty of implied meaning” in order to arouse readers’ resonance and aesthetic experience. “Beauty of implied meaning” may be ideological, or it may not; in any case, it is a kind of subjective experience that can evoke aesthetic feeling, similar to what the formalist aesthetician Clive Bell called “significant form.”
Clive Bell defined this as: “I call these combinations and relations of lines and colors, and these aesthetically moving forms, ‘significant form’; it is that common quality possessed by all works of visual art.” It may not be entirely apt, but the lines and colors here, viewed abstractly, refer to nothing more than a form and the materials and modes of combining materials (“relations”) used to fill the form—this is in fact what was called above the beauty of form and the beauty of painting. Clive Bell also emphasized: “All systems of aesthetics must be based on personal experience; that is to say, they must be subjective.” This is why this article insists that beauty of implied meaning is highly indeterminate.
Simply put, beauty of implied meaning can be summarized as “words are finite, meaning is infinite,” similar to what Tao Yuanming called “wanting to distinguish it, yet already forgetting the words.” From the work itself, “stopping at just the right point” and “meaning beyond words” are two techniques commonly used by “Leda and the Swan” to render implied meaning.
Examples of stopping at just the right point are everywhere: the whole poem is about the swan’s rape of the girl, but in describing the swan, the author uses only a few verbs and nouns; throughout the poem, apart from the title, he does not mention “swan.” And for such a violent rape process, and Leda’s gradual acceptance, the author likewise accomplishes it only through the depiction of a few iconic images—for instance, “loosening thighs”: with just one “loosening,” the later suggestion of Leda’s psychological process of yielding, even accepting the rape, is rendered true and vivid. Even more thought-provoking is the reflection on the later Trojan War. Broken walls and ruins, burning roofs and towers, Agamemnon’s death—just a few lines pull the reader from the union of god and mortal into reflections on sex and war, and the subsequent philosophical meditation.
The climax of the poem’s implied meaning, and its point of eruption, is undoubtedly in the final two lines: “Did she put on his knowledge with his power/Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?” In the process of uniting with Zeus, did Leda, through the god’s omniscience and omnipotence, foresee in advance the complex consequences produced by this union? If not, then after the union, would she possess that omniscient and omnipotent divine power? Would she thereby change history? If so, then why did she still continue to unite with Zeus? What exactly is the trajectory of history? What is Leda’s future choice? On this, the author shows no obvious bias; the answer is open. And this open-ended conclusion further deepens the poem’s philosophical nature and beauty of implied meaning, leaving one with much to ponder.
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