"Leda and the Swan"
By William Butler Yeats

Transcription, correction, editorial commentary, and markup by Students and Staff of the University of Virginia
     

Sources

New York : The Dial Publishing Company, 1924Yeats' 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).,

Editorial Statements

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.

Citation

Yeats, William Butler. "Leda and the Swan". The Dial: A Magazine for Literature, Philosophy, and Religion, The Dial Publishing Company, 1924 , Vol. 76, Number 6, p 495 . Literature in Context: An Open Anthology. http://anthologydev.lib.virginia.edu/work/Yeats/yeats-leda. Accessed: 2024-04-27T09:10:57.124Z

Linked Data: Places related to this work.

THE DIAL

 JUNE 1924 495 WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS LEDA AND THE SWAN 1A sudden blow: the great wings beating still 2Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed 3By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill, 4He holds her helpless breast upon his breast. 5How can those terrified vague fingers push 6The feathered glory from her loosening thighs? 7And how can body, laid in that white rush, 8But feel the strange heart beating where it lies? 9A shudder in the loins engenders there 10The broken wall, the burning roof and tower 11And Agamemnon dead. 12Being so caught up, 13So mastered by the brute blood of the air, 14Did she put on his knowledge with his power 15Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

Footnotes