Modernist Sonnet Form

“Leda and the Swan” is a sonnet, a traditional fourteen-line poem written in iambic pentameter. The poem uses the rhyme scheme of the Shakespearean sonnet for the first two quatrains (four-line stanzas), and the rhyme scheme of the Petrarchan sonnet for the last six lines: abab cdcd efgefg. (The rhyme scheme of the first two quatrains of the Petrarchan sonnet is abba abba; the rhyme scheme of the last six lines of the Shakespearean sonnet is efef gg.) However, the subject matter of the work is extremely nontraditional — most sonnets are about love or public matters, not violent rape. Yeats breaks with tradition and creates a sonnet in a daring modernist style. The poem is full of such paradoxes, or oppositional elements, which is one of the sources of its richness. For example, the sonnet is one of the most precise and tightly controlled forms of poetry, but Yeats chooses this structure to describe a situation of explosive power and intensity. An act of force and violence is described within a structure of order and control. The poem is written in iambic pentameter, so it moves along in a steady, pulsating way. But Yeats uses phrases to break up the traditional meter — there is an abrupt break after the opening words, for example, and again after the description of what is engendered by the union: “And Agamemnon dead.” The total effect is of a rhythm that reflects the event being explicated: a throbbing sensation is created that is broken up by dramatic moments of even greater intensity. The line break in the middle of the sestet is the only nontraditional element in terms of the sonnet’s formal structure, and it is used to emphasize the sudden end of the rape and to distance the reader from the event. The rhyme used in the poem is traditional for the sonnet form, but the mixture of perfect and imperfect rhymes (“push” and “rush” in lines 5 and 7, “up” and “drop” in lines 11 and 14) add variety and interest.