Style

Recurring Image

The swan is an image that is found in many of Yeats’s poems. (His poetry, in fact, is full of birds of various sorts, from eagles to owls to parrots, but the swan is the most frequently recurrent bird symbol.) Although what the swan represents evolves in Yeats’s poetry, it seems for him to be essentially a symbol of mystery and passion. In “Leda and the Swan,” the swan is mysterious, divine, incomprehensible, violent, and brutally passionate. The use of the swan and other recurring images in Yeats’s poetry also serve to draw his entire body of work into a coherent whole. By using certain images over and over again, he creates a shorthand that allows readers to recognize complex ideas that may not be explicitly mentioned in a particular poem but are the focus of other works. The swan in some of Yeats’s other works, such as “The Wild Swans at Coole,” “The Tower,” and “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” represents wildness, rage, bitterness, and unsatisfied desire, and some of those thoughts will echo in this poem to a reader familiar with Yeats’s poetry.