"Leda and the Swan," a sonnet by William Butler Yeats, describes a rape. According to Perrine, "the first quatrain describes the fierce assault and the foreplay; the second quatrain, the act of intercourse; the third part of the sestet, the sexual climax" (147). The rape that Yeats describes is no ordinary rape: it is a rape by a god. Temporarily embodied in the majestic form of a swan, Zeus, king of the gods, consummated his passion for Leda, a mortal princess (Perrine 147). The union produced two offspring: Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra, Agamemnon's wife. In recounting this "momentous rape" with "large consequences for the future," (Perrine 147) Yeats uses rhetorical figures in each of the sonnet's three stanzas.
The figures in the first stanza create tension and portray the event. All definitions for the rhetorical figures mentioned in this essay are derived from Lanham's A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms. Yeats opens with an example of brachylogia, brevity of speech.......
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Approximate Word Count: 1437
Approximate Pages: 6 (260 words per double-spaced page) |