Comparing Theories Of W. B. Yeats Leda And The Swan

Theories of Post-Coloniality: Edward W. Said and W.B. Yeats

(Citations from Said’s essay “Yeats and Decolonization” as published by Bay Press, not the Field Day pamphlet)

Post-colonial theory, a mode of thought which accepts European Imperialism as a historical fact and attempts to address nations touched by colonial enterprises, has as yet failed to adequately consider Ireland as a post-colonial nation. Undoubtedly, Ireland is a post-colonial nation (where ‘post-’colonial refers to any consequence of colonial contact) with a body of literary work that may be read productively as post-colonial.

Although colonialism, as a subject for Irish criticism and theory, has been tentatively broached (for example, see Celtic Revivals (1985) by

The reclaiming of Ireland, of the geographical space and the imagining of a community in his poetry, acts as a resistance to colonialism. For Said “Leda and the Swan” (Yeats’s Poems 322) represents Yeats “at his most powerful” where “he imagines and renders” (24) the results of the colonial relationship between Ireland and Britain. The poem has been further discussed in this vain by Declan Kiberd (Inventing Ireland 312-315) who interprets the “swan as the invading occupier and the girl as a ravished Ireland” (315). This reading, to Donoghue’s mind, exemplifies the confusion of his lecture “Confusion in Irish Studies”, yet there is something profitable to a post-colonial reading of

If one takes the Swan to be colonial Britain and Leda a feminised and dominated Ireland it would appear Yeats was offering a deep and prophetic commentary on the consequences of colonialism. According to Greek mythology, following the rape of Leda, Clytemnestra was born who would later kill Agamemnon. Here Yeats indicates that the birth of the new nation of Ireland after the withdrawal of England, the dropping from the “indifferent beak”, was destined to a chaotic and violent life. Anti-colonial nationalism, in effect based on a colonial model of state, searching for a return to a pre-colonial Ireland without acknowledging the hybridity of a new Irish culture, would inevitably lead to civil war. Unfortunately Yeats does not offer a solution to the problems of reasserting an Irish nation after colonialism, but his commentary does offer an insight to the complexities a post-colonial nation may