This poem was written by William Butler Yeats in 1928 and it's based in the Greek mythology.
I decided to talk about this poem because it totally caught my attention when the teacher started to explaining it. All of the poems that we've been covered so far, are weird, freak, or non-attractive for most of us, since in my case, I'm use to know or read poems of love and that are really understandable and do not need a second reading. So, digging into this poem and realizing what actually represented it, gave me a sort of slap in my face: love poems are boring.
Moreover, realizing that the poem was talking about a raped girl called Leda and that Swan was similar to God (Zeus), didn't give me a more understandable way of what was the final objective of this poem, and less noticing that Swan was the one who raped Leda. At the end, Leda gave birth to four eggs, in which each of them were key figures of the war of Troy.
One of the things that Yeats is trying to accomplish throught this poem is to, us, think and question about the origin of things. This is related to modernism since one of the characteristics of it is to question everything. So this could be one of the many others new inventions of shaping or reshaping history that come up everyday in that time and through this, sort of make sense of a new vision of reality.
Thus, if we think about the conception of everything, what would happen if this poem is a comparison of what Jesus and Maria had? Leaving apart that the angel Gabriel was suppose to be the one who left pregnated Maria, we can see it like this: the violence that we live and see nowadays are a consequence of what Swan/Jesus did to Leda/Maria: force her, with violence to have relations.
I'm my personal opinion, this comparison is something huge in which we can make assumptions. You can believe it or not, but this is for me, more logical than any other story that I ever heard before. If modernism brought an individualist man, it's not so hard to believe that this could happen. We have the example of thousands of men that do the same to girls like Leda, leaving apart that in this poem beauty seems to generate violence.
To continue, another point of view that I would like to add is the idea that we, our entire life, have been hearing about Jesus and Maria like a sort of goodness, even if we don't believe in that. We are constantly watching it in television or social networks; for Easter week, Christmas, and so on and so forth. We are not use to hear or watch other stories, other origins of times, or even believe in something different from what most of the people think. I sincerely believe that the more options we have, like an spectrum, about the origins of times, the more we can discuss and debate or meditate, and is that wrong? I don't think so.
All things considered, the challenge for Yeats was to come up with a new and original perspective on the story, and he actually did it. As I already mentioned above, the story has not been told as frequently in words as in images. Finally, and what I thought it's very important to mention as an open question: why it's seen as something bad to question things and give it another turn to issues like the origin of times? the end of the world? or even if we really exist, here and now?
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ResponderEliminarI must admit that I liked this poem. What I found appealing about it was the underlying aspects of it, for instance, I found very interesting the fact that Yeats was referring to Greek mythology in Leda and the Swan.
As we all know Greeks knew what their children's life would tourn out to be, what will they do or suffer. Do you remember reading Oedipus Rex? In the story , Oedipus’s parents already knew that he would kill his own father and marry his mother, in order to evade fate they abandoned Oedipus in the mountains.
Now, maybe Yeats affirms trough his poem that Zeus is implanting knowledge of future events that would shape the history of Greece to Leda. we must remember that Leda becomes the mother of four of the key figures of the war of troy.
Maybe, that's why Leda is not so reluctant to have sex with a swan in the second part of the poem. At first, she is shocked, a bit confused, but then she seems to be more comfortable with the idea.