The Cycle of History

Yeats viewed history as cyclical and believed that every two thousand years a new era would be ushered in that would be the antithesis, or opposite, of the one that was being replaced. Again, although he makes no overt reference to his theory of history in the poem, Yeats uses the subject of Leda and the swan to illustrate a moment in which the cycle is begun anew. The use of tense in the poem calls attention to the timelessness of the event and so the cyclical nature of history. The rape is described in the first eight lines using present tense, but, as seen in lines 9 to 11, the act engenders consequences that are yet to be experienced in the poem — they are in the future. The poem ends using the past tense, making it clear that the events described have already taken place. The entire effect is to convey the sense that the rape is more than an assault on a particular woman at a static moment in history, but it is also a symbol for universal and recurring — although certainly violent, painful, and destructive — elements of human experiences.

In “Leda and the Swan,” Yeats also seems to be pointing to his mystical theory of the universe, although he makes no overt references to it. The poem describes a moment that represents a change of era according to Yeats’s historical model of gyres, which he describes in his prose work A Vision. In that book, Yeats conceives of history as composed of two cones rotating in opposite directions. Every moment of time moves through these spirals and so contains two opposite but interpenetrating movements, as one cone widens and the other narrows. The spiralling motions are called gyres. The times of the greatest turbulence in history are when the gyres reverse their motions, which happens every two thousand years

The rape of Leda by Zeus is an event that brings forth such a reversal. It brings forth a new era, one that is antithetical to the civilization out of which it sprang and which it replaces. Another example of an event that comes from the reversal of the gyres, according to Yeats, is the annunciation and descent of the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove to the Virgin Mary, which resulted in the birth of Christ. He held, in fact, that this event brought forth a reversal of the era that was spawned by the rape of Leda as described in “Leda and the Swan.”