The famous story of Leda and the Swan became even more well known when William Butler Yeats wrote a poem about the incident, published in 1928. If you do not know the basic story, Read the History of Leda and the Swan.

Some quick vocabulary hints:
webs: a swan's foot is webbed
nape: the back of a person's neck
bill: the swan's beak

Leda and the Swan

A sudden blow:

The great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in the 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?

William Butler Yeats

Think about what the sonnet is saying. Instead of presenting Zeus (the swan) as being a romantic seducer, Yeats turns the story into a fierce rape, where Leda tries to resist the attack.

Large swans have been kept around England for hundreds of years as a valuable food source and are very aggressive. The poem evokes powerful imagery for any person who, as a child, had one of these huge birds intimidate them.

Some have asked if a giant swan could actually make love to a human woman. Without getting into specific details, male swans (and all birds) do indeed have male sex organs, which they use to impregnate a female bird, mounting her from behind. So if you had a gigantic swan which was the human embodiment of the god Zeus, he could indeed impregnate Queen Leda.


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