"Leda and the Swan" William Butler Yeats Howe Tonya Transcription, correction, editorial commentary, and markup Students and Staff of the University of Virginia National Endowment for the Humanities Literature in Context
University of Virginia P. O. Box 400121 Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121 lic.open.anthology@gmail.com
Published by Literature in Context under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 Unported License "Leda and the Swan" William Butler Yeats The Dial: A Magazine for Literature, Philosophy, and Religion New York The Dial Publishing Company 1924 Yeats' poem was initially printed in The Dial (76.6) of June 1924, and then subsequently published in The Cat and the Moon and Certain Poems (Cuala Press, Dublin, 1924). Cuala Press was an important private Arts and Crafts press in Ireland, set up by Yeats' sister Elizabeth and associated with the Irish Literary Revival of the early 20th century. This digital edition uses the first printing in The Dial, available on Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/sim_dial_1924-06_76). Vol. 76, Number 6, p 495 English print single poem

This text is prepared as part of the Literature in Context project, which provides an accessible, reliable, curated, and marked-up selection of primary sources relevant to the study and the teaching of British and American literature. This project is was initially funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and developed by faculty at The University of Virginia and Marymount University.

Research informing these annotations draws on publicly-accessible resources, with links provided where possible. Annotations have also included common knowledge, defined as information that can be found in multiple reliable sources. If you notice an error in these annotations, please contact lic.open.anthology@gmail.com.

Original spelling and capitalization is retained, though the long s has been silently modernized and ligatured forms are not encoded.

Hyphenation has not been retained, except where necessary for the sense of the word.

Page breaks have been retained. Catchwords, signatures, and running headers have not.

Materials have been transcribed from and checked against first editions, where possible. See the Sources section for more information.

 Numbered divs used. Library of Congress Name Authority File Library of Congress Classification Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names Open Researcher and Contributor ID transcribed for Literature in Context edition THE DIAL JUNE 1924
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS LEDA AND THE SWAN A sudden blow: the great wings beating still Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill, He holds her helpless breast upon his breast. How can those terrified vague fingers push The feathered glory from her loosening thighs? And how can body, laid in that white rush, But feel the strange heart beating where it lies? A shudder in the loins engenders there The broken wall, the burning roof and tower And Agamemnon dead. Being so caught up, So mastered by the brute blood of the air, Did she put on his knowledge with his power Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?