17 pages • 34-minute read
Leda and the Swan
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Symbols & Motifs
Domination
Domination is an important motif throughout “Leda and the Swan.” The central act of domination is Zeus’s domination of Leda, when with her “her nape caught in his bill / He holds her helpless breast upon his breast” (Lines 3-4) and rapes her. The rape is Zeus’s way of asserting his divine power (as a god) over that of mortals, but it also speaks more simply to the traditional gendered domination of men over women.
The poem suggests that this act of domination is mirrored and enlarged in the Trojan War later caused by Helen of Troy’s infidelity:
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead” (Lines 9-11).
The juxtaposition of the moment Leda conceives Helen with the imagery of Troy’s destruction not only explicitly links the two events in terms of linear causality but also suggests the thematic importance that cycles of violence have in the poem more generally (See: Themes): Since domination begets other forms of domination, violence also begets violence.
The Swan
The swan is one of the poem’s two important symbols, as it is both Zeus’s avian disguise in raping Leda and a symbol of his power. The speaker describes the swan as unusually powerful and threatening, with Leda’s neck in his beak (“her nape caught in his bill” [Line 3]) as he towers over her with his “great wings beating still” (Line 1). His “feathered glory” (Line 6) speaks of his divine origins, while the “indifferent beak” (Line 15) that releases Leda after the violation emphasizes the god’s casual cruelty.
In taking on a nonhuman form and raping a mortal woman, Zeus disrupts the usual human-animal and mortal-divine dynamics, asserting his power in a terrible and unnatural way. What is more, as previously noted, swans are traditional symbols of love and fidelity—taking on the form of the swan to commit rape is a further ironic inversion of expectations.
The Trojan War
The Trojan War is the other important symbol in the poem. It is alluded to in the final stanza, when the speaker describes “The broken wall, the burning roof and tower / And Agamemnon dead” (Lines 10-11). Line 10 refers to the sack of Troy during the Trojan War—which will bring the total destruction of the city—while Line 11 refers to the eventual murder of Agamemnon, Helen of Troy’s brother-in-law, upon his return home from the war. The Trojan War functions both as the secondary event that Zeus’s rape of Leda will lead to and as a broader symbol of the brutality and inhumanity of violence.
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