Leda

Christina Pham Lea Clarkson Humanities DC - Block 1 8 October 2015 Greek Mythology Both, Castor and Pollux were seen as great horsemen, however Castor was most noted with this quality. Pollux, in addition to being a great horsemen, was a known as a renowned fighter and boxer. In addition to each other, they had siblings: Helen of Troy, who was the war fought over, and Clytemnestra, who was involved in the electra complex. The parent(s) is Leda and Tyndareus, who were the king and queen of Sparta Castor and Pollux, also called Dioscuri which mean Sons of Zeus, were twin brothers of the mother Leda of Sparta, while the father is not fully agreed upon. The speculation of the father is between Tyndareus, who is the husband of Leda where they are…

Troy. In “Leda and the Swan,” Yeats explains a famous Greek myth, where Leda is raped by Zeus in the form of a massive swan. This copulation led to the conception of Helen, who history deems as the beauty who launched a thousand ships in the Trojan War. In his sonnet, Yeats observes how the consequences…

Power Wrongly Implies Privilege Power, position, fame and wealth can wrongly give a sense of entitlement. In Greek mythology, this entitlement was the accepted norm. In today’s society everyone is held accountable for their actions; however, people of power often think their actions have no consequences. The poem “Leda and the Swan” written by William Butler Yeats is comparable to current media reports in today’s society; men of power being accused of sexual misconduct against women. Many…

Yeats’s poem ‘’Leda and the Swan’’ and Dorothy Hewitt’s ‘’Grave Fairytale’’ have content that is both mythological and violently sexual. In Yeats’ poem the speaker retells a story from Greek mythology. It is that of the rape of Leda by Zeus. In Hewitt’s poem, the speaker creates a new version of Rapunzel’s fairytale. This essay will discuss the relationship between mythology/ folklore, violence and sex through the analysis of both poems. In Yeats’ poem, the speaker resents the rape scene,…

In her poem, Leda, it is centered around a different kind of empowerment. This poem is a bit more complex than the last, mostly due to the complicated language used. The whole poem in my perspective is based around a sexual relationship. My favorite line though is the ending of the poem where it seems as though the relationship is coming to a close when she writes "you want what a man wants, next time come as a man or don 't come." 660. The plain and simple, if you cannot handle all of it, you…

Yeats uses a Petrarchan sonnet form and switches midway to the English form, possibly to highlight not only corrupted love, but also to point to British involvement. Leda and the Swan is, except for the broken eleventh line and the slant rhymes, a formal--albeit mixed--sonnet. Ironically, Heaney uses the forms of two English sonnets to describe the debasement of Ireland. Parts I and II of Act of Union are cause and effect sonnets using slant rhyme. Heaney’s sporadic upheavals of the orthodox…

The poem ‘Leda and the Swan’ by William Butler Yeats retells a renown story from Greek mythology. According to the myth, Leda, a queen of Sparta, was raped or seduced by Zeus in the guise of a swan. Leda then gave birth to three eggs, one of which did not hatch. The other two gave life to Helen (of Troy) and Pollux, who are assumed to be children of Zeus, and Castor and Clytemnestra, children of Leda’s husband Tyndareus. In the poem, Yeats alludes to the Trojan war and depicts unusually violent…

LEDA seeks to bring together a community of scholars whose diverse life experiences have shaped their perspectives and goals. Tell us your story. How has your life experience shaped the person you are today? Growing up my parents have only always expressed pure love and happiness around everyone, even though we faced a lifetime of financial problems. They helped me grow up to think positive about life even if everything might be falling apart. At one point, I remembered my parents having to sell…

literature to a form that is more accepted in the younger generation of readers. In doing this modification, Greenman and O’Hara took the serious aspect away from their literature. Frank O’Hara has implemented this technique in his poems “An Image Of Leda” and “Poem,” and Ben Greenman in his book Celebrity Chekov. In the poem “An Image Of Leda,” Frank O’Hara links the similarities between the movie theater and the Greek myth Leda and the Swan. To many, this poem is considered a Low from of art…

and language (Tuttle, 184). It refashions antecedent narratives into entirely neoteric texts, amending primary cultural norms. Lastly, heterodoxy prescribes empiricism in that “new meanings must generate new forms…[it] simultaneously modernizes what is ancient and reduces the verbal glow that we are trained to associate with mythic material” (Ostriker 87). Each new iteration of the Leda and the Swan myth recasts the narrative edifice to suit the poet’s worldview. As William Butler Yeats and…