Rhetorical Figures in Leda and the Swan

Rhetorical Figures in Leda and the Swan

"Leda and the Swan," a sonnet by William Butler Yeats, describes a rape. According to Perrine, "the first quatrain describes the fierce assault and the foreplay; the second quatrain, the act of intercourse; the third part of the sestet, the sexual climax" (147). The rape that Yeats describes is no ordinary rape: it is a rape by a god. Temporarily embodied in the majestic form of a swan, Zeus, king of the gods, consummated his passion for Leda, a mortal princess (Perrine 147). The union produced two offspring: Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra, Agamemnon's wife. In recounting this "momentous rape" with "large consequences for the future," (Perrine 147) Yeats uses rhetorical figures in each of the sonnet's three stanzas.

The figures in the first stanza create tension and portray the event. All definitions for the rhetorical figures mentioned in this essay are derived from Lanham's A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms. Yeats opens with an example of brachylogia, brevity of speech. His elliptical fragment, "A sudden blow," recreates the stunning impact and tension of the assault. The poet uses alliteration in the form of consonance: the plosive "b" first found in "blow" subtly batters the ear throughout the quatrain--"beating," "bill," and "breast," which occurs twice; the initial "g" found in "great" echoes in "girl"; and an initial "h" repeats in "her," which occurs three times, "he," "holds," "helpless," and "his". Yeats ends the first line with "beating still," an example of anastrophe, a kind of hyperbaton, the unusual arrangement of words or clauses within a sentence, frequently for poetic effect. The figure not only creates tension through arrangement but also throug...

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...idled sexual passion, the coexistence of power and wisdom in human life, and the potential for combining youthful vitality and passion with mature knowledge and wisdom.

Works Cited

Lanham, Richard A. A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms. 2nd ed. Berkeley: U of California P. 1991. 1-161.

Perrine, Laurence. Instructor's Manual to Accompany Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense. 4th ed. New York: Harcourt. 1983. 147-48.

Yeats, William Butler. "Leda and the Swan." Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense. 4th ed. Ed. Laurence Perrine. New York: Harcourt. 1983. 636

The Spiritual Marriage of Maud Gonne and W.B Yeats

(excerpt from Women of the Golden Dawn: Rebels and Priestesses by Mary K. Greer--an account of Yeats's fascination with the beautiful Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne, who inspired his greatest poetry and plays))