suggests that significant historical changes often stem from violent and inexplicable beginnings. Moreover, with imagery like the “broken wall, the burning roof and tower” following Leda’s brutal attack, Yeats hints that violence tends to breed more violence throughout human history.

“Leda and the Swan” is a well-known work by Yeats, categorized among his "Annunciation" poems. The poem's initial version, published in 1924, was named “Annunciation.” In Christian lore, the Annunciation describes the moment when the archangel Gabriel informs the Virgin Mary that she will conceive a child by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit, symbolized by a dove, descends upon Mary, fulfilling Gabriel’s prophecy. This divine union leads to the birth of Jesus Christ, marking the transition from an old era to a new age and the rise of Christian civilization. In “Leda and the Swan,” Yeats presents a different kind of annunciation. In this narrative, the god Zeus, also in the form of a bird, descends upon Leda, impregnating her with Helen. Helen's birth eventually causes the fall of Greek civilization and heralds a new modern age. Yeats draws a comparison between Zeus’s assault on Leda and the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary. Both Mary and Leda's children have a significant impact on the world, with their conceptions symbolizing pivotal moments in history. For Yeats, the annunciation represents a moment when divine energy merges with human life to rejuvenate a declining civilization.

In “Leda and the Swan,” along with other annunciation poems by Yeats such as “The Magi,” “Two Songs from a Play,” “The Mother of God,” and “The Second Coming,” the focus is on the violence and terror inherent in the union of god and human. Yeats implies that any merging of the divine and human realms is bound to be a frightening experience. Despite this, he suggests that during such a fusion, the mortal may gain supernatural or transcendent insight. Therefore, the speaker at the poem’s end wonders whether Leda, as she is overpowered by the “brute blood of the air,” acquires some form of divine knowledge and power through her ordeal.

Yeats viewed history as a series of repeating cycles, suggesting that every two thousand years, a new era arises that is in sharp contrast to the one before it. While he doesn't directly mention his historical theory in the poem, Yeats uses the myth of Leda and the swan to illustrate a moment when a new cycle begins. The poem's shifting tenses emphasize the timeless nature of this event, highlighting history's cyclical pattern. The rape is described in the present tense in the first eight lines, but lines 9 to 11 reveal future outcomes yet to occur in the poem. By ending in the past tense, the poem suggests that these events have already taken place. This approach indicates that the rape is more than an attack on a single woman at a specific time; it represents universal, recurring, and often violent, painful, and destructive aspects of human experience.

In “Leda and the Swan,” Yeats also hints at his mystical view of the universe, even though he doesn't directly reference it. The poem captures a moment symbolizing a shift in eras according to Yeats’s historical concept of gyres, which he elaborates on in his prose work A Vision. In that book, Yeats describes history as two cones spinning in opposite directions. Each point in time moves through these spirals, representing two conflicting yet interconnected movements, with one cone expanding while the other contracts. These spirals are called gyres. The most tumultuous periods in history occur when the gyres reverse their directions, an event happening every two thousand years.

The assault of Leda by Zeus represents such a reversal, heralding a new era that opposes the previous civilization. Another event Yeats associates with the gyres' reversal is the annunciation and the descent of the Holy Spirit as a dove to the Virgin Mary, leading to Christ's birth. He believed this event signaled the reversal of the era initiated by Leda's rape, as portrayed in “Leda and the Swan.”

In Yeats’s mythological poetry, the Christian revelation is not the only divinely inspired one; it is not unique. It does, however, share an honored place in concert with the world’s other great religious myths—though its truth is not everlasting. Things thought to be true for too long (for Yeats, that time is about two thousand years) eventually can no longer be believed: Myth is symbols in motion, for Yeats as for William Blake, and the symbols must always be renewed. After their validity is exhausted, myths undergo change, flux, and rebirth. Indeed, the very heart of the prevailing myth contains the seeds of its own destruction. That is one reason why “Leda and the Swan,” depicting the very inauguration of the predestined Greek era, concludes with the one question whose real answer is beyond the pale of the Greek imagination: Could Leda fathom Zeus’s knowledge before being dropped? Perhaps more to the point, can the poem’s reader comprehend the heart mysteries here? The real answer is beyond the merely logical categories of yes and no, since the real poem transcends the categories of the myths it utilizes to lead the reader to an inward vision. One might assume that no Greek would imagine Leda, being but a vessel for that august era, could “put on his knowledge with his power.” The question simply would not pertain.

In sharp contrast to Leda, the Virgin Mary must have understood much, since she was given a choice: the Christian Annunciation is like a proposal, and Mary had free will in accepting the role of being the mother of God because Christianity cherishes informed free will as the Greeks cherished fated human destiny. Unlike the “brute blood of the air,” the Dove of the Christian age is holy, aphysical, and otherworldly. To even think of the Virgin’s “loosening thighs” would be sacrilegious, and any question of her sexual arousal would simply not pertain. There are built-in parameters, limitations, and presuppositions in every mythology, yet therein lies the nemesis of the Christian dispensation: Under Plato’s influence, the body (the “mere flesh”) for the Christian myth is all but irrelevant. In the end, the reign of the Dove, like the reign of the Swan, must pass away—for no myth can embody all truth, and certainly not for all time. If Leda, as mortal life, as vehicle for beauty that is inherently tragic, and as aesthetic affirmation, is momentarily thought of as the poet, the artificer of eternity, the bard of wisdom, then the implosion of the divine into the human can be understood in a yet more profound manner: as Annunciation not divorced from Epiphany.

Yeats intends ultimately to share with his reader the visionary truth of this conjunction of the divine and the human: It is not merely a symbol of what has already happened historically at Bethlehem or beneath some Olympian cloud, for both Dove and Swan pass away. The fortunate reader of Yeats, however, if not prejudiced against the brute flesh or biased in favor of the fleshless spirit, can, by meditating upon these symbols that pass away, attain the visionary moment of knowledge and power, the timeless now where (as Yeats described it in “Among School Children”) the dancer need not be distinguished from the dance.