Yeats invents his own system of metaphors in the poem “Leda and the Swan.” The system urges Yeats to drive his poetry on unknown fields. Rather than following in the well worn tracks of Greek mythology, he tries to idealize a form of poetry that looks brief, yet carefully formed and worded: a metapoetic strategy by using related vocabulary at which he seems to excel. In the first stanza, he claims that Zeus visits Leda as a form of Swan and vividly draws in passionate language a picture of sexual intercourse by his sudden blow on Leda sleeping peacefully. His action looks like a rape on the surface, yet possibly interpreted in a different way, that is adultery between a god and a married woman; yet it thus turns out to be a historical moment worldly and spiritually at the moment of making love. Such words symbolizing as metaphors the relations of Lead and Swan in mythic stories are carefully crafted and allusively materialized to form a metapoetic allegory: a poetry that uses a system of related metaphors, violence and sex, to reflect implicitly on history in poetry and on its poetic program. Whether or not Yeats invents this metapoetic strategy, his poetic symbolism is strongly characteristic of his own connection to Greek symbolism as in mythic stories. Such a metapoetic approach as found in the poem can help us understand much about his own values on humanity, including why Yeats chooses to rewrite about such images, ideas, and poetic patterns as shown in Greek stories, and why−as in his discussion of violence and love put together in physical and spiritual beauty−he puts into question mythic literature and its literary criticism of love and battle just in the poem imitating Greek tales.

• 양병현(상지대학교) | Yang, Byung-Hyun