Power and Sexuality in “Leda and the Swan” and “Goblin Market”
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published 04/06/2008
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SummaryDuality and opposition are forces that play beneath the surface of both William Butler Yeats’ “Leda and the Swan” and Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”, two poems that focus on sexuality while incorporating animal figures as holders of power, both sexual and otherwise. “Leda and the Swan” is Yeats’ retelling of a well-known Greek myth, in which Zeus takes the form of a swan and rapes a mortal woman, Leda. Yeats takes a close-up, severely focused view of the rape itself, using dramatic imagery to convey the intensity of the moment. He pulls back at the poem’s end to look at the event through the lens of history set in motion by this action. The poem is very visual. It sketches for the reader the image of a swan and a maiden together, and the image is a striking one. But ultimately the poem is about rape, and Yeats denies the reader none of the violence of this action. The image, in its visual aesthetic, becomes something rather grotesque. The two sides of Yeats’ poem, that of the beautiful and that of the disgusting, also occur in Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”.
Table of Contents
- The poem employs fruit as a loose sexual allegory
- The animals –the swan and the goblins- act as opposites to the fair maidens
- The animals are entirely separate from this value system
- Looking at one of the binary figures in each poem, we can see its opposite
- The fruit of 'Goblin Market' is representative of the biblical fruit that contains knowledge of good and evil
- The ending of each poem poses a question
- The poem itself seems dissatisfied with the neat story of redemption and moral righteousness
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