Lines 9 – 11

In the final sestet the poem moves away from the description of the rape to its effect, shifting from an immediate physical description of the present to an abstract dramatization of the future. While the first part of the poem concentrated on the physicality of the act, the last stanza steps back from the present and situates it in the larger pattern of history. Also, while the first two stanzas of the poem had references to the whiteness of the swan and the blackness of its webs, the images in the final stanza are vivid with references to fire and blood.

Line 9 begins with the swan’s orgasm and ejaculation, the “shudder in the loins” that, it is explained, engenders, or gives rise to, a startling series of events. The act of rape just described, the speaker says, spawns “The broken wall, the burning roof and tower / And Agamemnon dead.” This compressed line and a half describe the fall of Troy (walls broken and roofs burned) and the death of Agamemnon at the conclusion of the Trojan War. That is, with the union of Leda and the swan will come the birth of Helen, and with that the series of events that culminates in the siege and fall of Troy, which signals the collapse of early Greek civilization and ushers in a new, modern age. The phrases “broken wall,” “burning roof,” and “tower” also have sexual connotations. The broken wall refers to the breaking of the female hymen in sexual intercourse; the burning roof refers to the vagina; the tower is a symbol of the phallus. Fire traditionally symbolizes sexual passion and represents the divine union with the human.

The break in line 11 is the only deviation from the traditional form of the sonnet, and the division stresses the completeness of thought presented in the previous eighteen words that express a vast historical process. This single event, the impregnation of the mortal woman Leda by the god Zeus signals the beginning of a new time in history. Here, in a few short lines, Yeats makes reference to his theory of history that claims that every two thousand years a new era of civilization is ushered in because of the reversal of the gyres. The mortal Leda is caught in this cosmic pattern, a helpless victim of divine forces that use her merely as a means to a larger end.