Language

Because Yeats uses such a narrow, tightly ordered structure for his poem, he uses words to their maximum effect. The language and images in the poem are a mixture of concrete and abstract, which conveys a sense of the immediacy of the event as well as its greater cosmic significance. The swan is never referred to as a swan, for example, but as “feathered glory” and “brute blood of the air,” which emphasizes its physical presence as well as its incomprehensible and divine nature. The use of body parts (and not their names) to refer to Leda and the swan (“thighs,” “fingers,” “nape,” “beak,” “webs,” “bill”) again stresses the physicality of the act. The diction in the poem is extremely simple, but the images created from them are vigorous (the “white rush,” for example, calls up an otherworldly image of the swan, as it indicates its physical whiteness as well as it power).

The use of strong, simple verbs (“caught,” “hold,” “push,” “drop”) further emphasizes the sense of action. Yeats also plays on words a great deal in the poem, thus communicating several meanings in the confines of taut phrases. The images of the “broken wall, the burning roof and tower” are references to the siege of Troy but are also sexual allusions. With the phrase “the staggering girl” he draws attention to Leda’s physical as well as her psychological state. Yeats manages to communicate extremely complex ideas about the ushering in of a new era through the violent union of human and divine and the cycle of history in very few words. He does this by presenting vivid images that have multiplicity of meanings and by carefully changing the tense in the poem from present to future to past to draw attention to the timelessness of the action that he has depicted in such immediate terms.