Four Late-Victorian Ledas and Yeats’s
Precursors of “Leda and the Swan”
Leda is known to Greek mythology as a queen of ancient Sparta. While bathing in a lake or stream, she is seduced or perhaps raped by Zeus in the form of a swan and comes to lay a pair of eggs from which hatch Helen of Troy and the twin heroes Castor and Pollux. Depictions of the myth have been popular in visual art since antiquity. Though some are comic or vaguely menacing, the prevailing mood—as in the copy of Michelangelo’s famous lost painting that appears above—is sensual. In fact, an analysis by a New Zealand psychiatrist of a hundred representations of the myth over the centuries finds no sign of force on the part of the bird: “Although there are sinister elements to some of the pictures, rather than resisting, Leda is represented variously as tender, receptive and often very actively participating.”
The same is true of literary portrayals before Yeats, but three poems written at the turn of the century that challenged convention in other ways likely helped inspire his well-known 1923 sonnet “Leda and the Swan.” In what follows, I propose to survey these works and trace some connections among them and their authors. But first let’s look at a more traditional version of the myth by the poet Charles Dalmon that is nonetheless very much of the fin de siècle.
A Decadent Leda
Dalmon’s reputation was never high, and he is little known today. Consulting an encyclopedia of British culture in the 1890s, I was surprised to find no entry on him in its 700 pages. From other sources, I gather that his working-class origin and claimed gypsy blood may have hindered his reception. In his graceful lyric “Leda Waiting for Jupiter” (1892), the young queen is a more than willing partner:
I. Will he drift where he has drifted If I dive into the lake? If I swim among the lilies, Swan-like lilies, Will he follow in my wake? II. All last night the stars were misted, And the moon was very wan, And I heard a mournful singing— Swans die singing— Did I hear a dying swan? III. Bird of whiteness, all grace gifted, Glide along the waters blue! In the rushes I see whiteness, Swan-like whiteness, Part, sweet rushes, let him through!
The theme of giving in to a forbidden wish is here artfully evoked in the poem’s form. In its three stanzas, quatrains of trochaic tetrameter are parenthetically interrupted by a heavily stressed dimeter line in the second-to-last place—“Swan-like lilies,” “Swans die singing,” “Swan-like whiteness”—that echoes the previous line ending and obsessively relates it to the unusual object of desire.
As the middle stanza explains, this curious longing was awakened the night before when the speaker heard what sounded like a swan song—the beautiful call that, according to ancient legend, is uttered by the bird only at the point of death. Strangely, the association with death is shown to be a perverse turn-on as the swan song, like a mating call, draws Leda to the lake to seek out its source.
Dalmon was a poet of the Decadent school that came into fashion in Britain in the last decade of the nineteenth century. This group, led by Oscar Wilde, devoted itself to the worship of beauty apart from any notion of the good and a morbid fascination with physical and spiritual decline. The decorative surface of Dalmon’s poem, its scandalous subject, and its theme linking death and sexual desire typify this mode.
An Ekphrastic Leda
Another version of the myth is given in a poem published the same year by “Michael Field,” the pen-name of two tobacco heiresses—Katherine Bradley and her niece Edith Cooper—who, as I plan to write more about in my next post, lived together as lesbian lovers and coauthored twenty-five volumes of verse tragedy, a voluminous daily journal, and eight collections of lyric poetry.
Titled “A Pen Drawing of Leda, by Sodoma,” the poem in question takes for its subject a work now attributed to Leonardo—one of only a handful to depict not the liaison itself but the happy domestic scene that is rather implausibly conjectured to have resulted, with Leda proudly showing her mate their oviparous offspring:
Here, in the interests of space, is the first of the poem’s two stanzas:
’Tis Leda lovely, wild and free, Drawing her gracious Swan down through the grass to see Certain round eggs without a speck: One hand plunged in the reeds and one dinting the downy neck, Although his hectoring bill Gapes toward her tresses, She draws the fondled creature to her will.
Poems describing a work of art were not uncommon in the nineteenth century, but to dedicate a whole collection to this theme, as Michael Field did in their 1892 publication Sight and Song, was—in the words of a contemporary review—a “bold experiment.” According to the preface, “the aim of this little volume is, as far as may be, to translate into verse what the lines and colours of certain chosen pictures sing in themselves”—in other words, not to use the works as inspiration but simply to reproduce them in lyrical form. In his notice in the Bookman, W.B. Yeats, who had favorably reviewed some early plays of Bradley and Cooper, regretted that though the coauthors had “poetic feeling and imagination in abundance, they have preferred to work with the studious and interpretive side of the mind and write a guide-book to the picture galleries of Europe.”
“A Pen Drawing of Leda, by Sodoma” escapes this judgment by making use of Leonardo’s eccentric rendering to present a fresh and modern view of its mythological subject. Leda, “lovely, wild, and free,” is portrayed as the swan’s affectionate mistress. Disregarding its noisy “hectoring”—a word that recalls the hero from whose name it derives and hence the Trojan War that will be fought for the sake of one of the hatchlings—she gently “draws the fondled creature to her will.”
A Blessed Leda
In Michael Field’s next collection, Underneath the Bough (1893), the pseudonymous poets return to the motif in the following untitled lyric:
Leda was wearied of her state, the crown was heavy on her head; She put the crown away, And ran down to the river-bed For a whole holiday. She came to draw free, lonely breaths beside the mellow, autumn pools; Counting their starry drops. She mused on the lone god who rules Above the mountain-tops. And, as she worshipped him with secret heart, among the willow-trees She felt how something sailed And gathered round her as a breeze: The breath within her failed. There were white feathers on her breast when she awoke; the water stirred With motion of white wings, And in her ear that note she heard The swan a-dying sings.
Here, in contradistinction to the tradition dominant since the Renaissance in visual art and literature alike, Leda’s encounter is represented not as a carnal one between woman and beast but primarily as a spiritual one between a queen and her god. That it has any physical basis is at first concealed from Leda and the reader by her swoon at the approach of the deity. Upon waking, she is left to discern the truth by certain signs: white feathers on her breast, a stirring of the water, a swan song.
So much is clear from a single reading, but a second or third reveals a latent meaning that dramatically sharpens this contrast and brings out a striking affinity between the poem and Yeats’s later sonnet. The clue lies in the final line. As in Dalmon’s poem, the swan is identified by means of its death cry. But what could such an association signify in the context of Field’s poem? And why is it deployed in the final line with such conclusive emphasis? The ancient legend does not speak of the swan’s dying after mating with Leda, and the implication here that it does is at odds with the creature’s identification with “the lone god who rules / Above the mountain-tops.” Unless, that is, the immortal being so designated is not the pagan sky-god Zeus but—as would naturally occur to Victorian readers—God the Father.
Once this much is grasped, the rest of the elements fall typologically into place: that “something” which sails and gathers round Leda as a breeze is the Holy Spirit; the “white feathers” on her breast were left by its descent in the form of a dove; the “water stirred / With motion of white wings” is the pool of Bethseda (John 5:4), a site of Christ’s healing; the “swan a-dying” is Christ on his cross; and Queen Leda, apprehending by these signs that she has received a visit from the supreme deity and will bear his seed, is Mary at the Annunciation. Bradley and Cooper were not orthodox Christians at this point—not until the spiritual crisis brought on by the death of their beloved chow dog in 1906 would they convert to the Church of Rome. In this earlier period, they professed instead a classically inspired worship of life and fellowship. But how better to turn on its head the customary sensual reading of this woman-centered myth and elevate it to a higher spiritual plane than to associate Leda with the Virgin Mother?
The idea of Leda as a precursor of the biblical Mary will be familiar to those who have studied “Leda and the Swan.” In his own commentary, Yeats spells out that he means to portray the rape of Leda as a “violent annunciation” which inaugurated, with the birth of Helen and the consequent fall of Troy, the heroic age of Greek civilization—just as the Christian age came into being with the birth of Jesus two thousand years later and, another two thousand years after that, as he thought, the prophesied birth of the rough beast of “The Second Coming” would usher in a savage, post-Christian epoch.
Could Yeats have picked up from Michael Field the notion that the fertilization of Leda’s eggs by Zeus is a sort of annunciation? There is little doubt, at least, that he read the poem. In 1901, he went to visit Bradley and Cooper, whose work had been neglected for years. “He knows our plays well and seems to care for them with insight,” Cooper noted in the women’s joint diary. “I was not prepared for this.” (She did not, however, care for his manner, disliking the affected way “his hands flap like flower-heads that grow on each side a stem and are shaken by the wind.”) In 1936, Yeats selected nine poems of Field’s for his edition of the Oxford Book of Modern Verse, in the introduction to which he declares, “I have said nothing of my own work, not from modesty, but because writing through fifty years I have been now of the same school with [Irish poets] John Synge and James Stephens, now in that of Sturge Moore and the younger ‘Michael Field.’’
Two Visionary Ledas
Thomas Sturge Moore, the other member of the school to which Yeats here claims to have at one time belonged, was a poet and artist five years Yeats’s junior. A devoted friend of Bradley and Cooper in their later years, he labored, as their literary executor, to prepare selections from their poetry and personal papers for posthumous publication. Yeats he met in 1900 and remained a constant correspondent until the older man’s death in 1939.
Sturge Moore’s collection To Leda and Other Odes (1909) is dedicated to Michael Field, and its title poem may well reflect the influence of Bradley and Cooper in its emphasis on Leda’s royal status and the spiritual nature of her experience. And yet it renders that experience as at the same time an intensely bodily one in a way that looks forward to Yeats’s sonnet.
In fact, though Sturge Moore’s ode is to my taste the least successful artistically of the works considered here, it reads uncannily like an egregiously rough draft of Yeats’s masterpiece. It even prefigures the latter in what might seem its most distinctive theme: the notion that in their act of sexual union, Leda was granted the god’s foreknowledge of Troy’s fate. In Sturge Moore’s poem, such knowledge is conveyed by means of song. The bird’s harmonious call evokes visions in her mind, including—in a notable anticipation of Yeats—a clairvoyant image of a burning tower:
O beautiful white woman, that white bird, Embraced ere long, Made rapturous music and was nobly stirred To wondrous song; Note surging through his throat On modulated note,— Sounds unsealing worlds of bliss, Dream-hallowed, sunset-flushed,— Sounds more melting than a kiss Received on midnight hushed,— Sounds that made thee know, Troy must be burned, Helen be loved and blamed; Ay, distant, ’neath thy closed lids, were discerned Those shriek-pulsed towers that flamed….
The communion between Leda and the god in his bestial form does not end there. In their embraces, she shares in “the power of wings… that had flown / Where [her] dazed thoughts ne’er dared”—“put[ting] on,” as suggested in Yeats’s sonnet, “his knowledge with his power.” And while in Sturge Moore’s ode this power is not used against Leda, who is “most nobly wooed,” it nevertheless might be: the “strength” she comes to know is one she “could[] no more question or forbid / Than struggle of [hers] might check”:
Delicious down of pulsing throat and breast Thine arms have known; Thy fanned heart all the power of wings confessed, Wings that had flown Where thy dazed thoughts ne’er dared; In bliss then thine, hath shared Strength, that had churned the river white Behind the mightiest swan; Strength, that was sudden like the light That reddens day-break wan; Strength thou couldst no more question or forbid, Than struggle of thine might check When, round thy shoulders, through thy tresses, glid That amorous god-like neck.
Yeats, of course, would develop this hint of violence, depicting the world-historic encounter as a convulsive assault. Coming upon “Leda and the Swan” after Sturge Moore’s “To Leda,” it seems to me a magnificent distillation of the themes and imagery that fill the latter’s nine expansive stanzas, one free of the archaism and high-flown rhetoric with which the original is encumbered:
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?Yeats is known as a Modernist poet, but he published his first collection in 1889. This summer I plan to write about the lives and careers of some of his fellow poets of the 1890s, starting—as mentioned above, and if all goes well—with Michael Field.
Sources
The standard authority on both literary and visual sources of “Leda and the Swan” is The Whole Mystery of Art: Pattern into Poetry in the Work of W. B. Yeats (1960) by Giorgio Melchiori, which devotes three chapters to the subject. Yet Melchiori mentions just one of Michael Field’s poems on Leda, and while two other works of Sturge Moore are cited, “To Leda” is inexplicably overlooked. The sole reference I have been able to find that identifies “To Leda” as a source of Yeats’s poem is a letter to the Times Literary Supplement (9 November 1962, p. 864) by Charles B. Gullans.
I consulted “Leda Waiting for Jupiter” in Charles William Dalmon, Minutiæ (1892); “A Pen Drawing of Leda, by Sodoma” in Michael Field, Sight and Song (1892); “Leda was wearied of her state” in Michael Field, Underneath the Bough (1893); “To Leda” in Poems by T. Sturge Moore (1917); and W.B. Yeats, The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936).
The art-historical study referred to is R.W. Medlicott, “Leda and the Swan—An Analysis of the Theme in Myth and Art,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry (1970). More on traditional and modern representations of the myth in Helen Sword, “Leda and the Modernists,” PMLA (1992).
The reference work mentioned is G.A. Cevasco, ed., The 1890s: An Encyclopedia of British Literature, Art, and Culture (1993).
On Michael Field, see Angela Leighton, Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart (1992) and Marion Thain and Ana Parejo Vadillo, Michael Field the Poet: Published and Manuscript Materials (2009), which reprints Yeats’s July 1892 review of Sight and Song in the Bookman.
On Sturge Moore, see Ursula Bridge, introduction to W. B. Yeats and T. Sturge Moore: Their Correspondence (1953).
Excellent stuff
Fabulous