sity to avague passive distance. The language in the beginning of the poem sets the tone of anaggressive sense of urgency. Priscilla Washburn Shaw makes an excellent point when shestates,The action interrupts upon the scene at the beginning with 'a sudden blow,' andagain, in the third stanza, with 'a shudder in the loins.' It may seem inaccurate to saythat a poem begins by an interruption when nothing precedes, but the effect of t heopening is just that (36). The effect of this device is that it draws the spectator/narrator, and subsequently thereader, into the action and into the poem. The action continues for the first three lines of the first quatrain. Yeatsdoesn't bother with a full syntax until the final line of the quatrain, at which point,the urgency relaxes (Hargrove 240). The language in the first full quatrain isrepresent ative of the opposition inherent in the poem; in this case, between intensityand distance (Hargrove 240). The imagery, and wording in general, in "Leda" is also representative, in aninitial reading, of oppositional elements within the text. A first reading shows Ledadescribed in concrete terms and the swan in abstract terms. Leda is "the staggeringgirl" and the poem refers to "Her thighs," "her nape," "her helpless breast," and "herloosening thighs." The swan is never actually called Zeus or even the Swan (in fact,Agamemnon is the only name mentioned in the body of the poem). The swan is described as"great wings," "dark webs," "that white rush," "blood," "indifferent beak," and"feathered glory." A second reading of the poem, however, shows that ambiguities do exist. Theconcrete and abstract merge. Generalized terms are used for Leda ("terrified vaguefingers") and concrete terms for the swan (wings, bill, beak). The purpose of thisambiguity could be, as Nancy Hargrove explains, "to stress that the god is, after all, areal, physical swan engaged in a physical act" (241). Regardless, this ambiguity ...
