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Yeats's Relationship With War And Violence In Leda And The Swan

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William Butler Yeats’s The Tower has illustrated his views on Ireland and its relationship with war and violence. This essay will use “Leda and the Swan”, “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” and “Meditations in Time of Civil War” to help understand Yeats’s engagement of violence. They also highlight how violence can be both creative and destructive effects. He uses subtle language and vivid imagery to engage in the effects of violence and also highlight the issues that associate with them. These poems highlight how historical events such as the Irish Civil War in Ireland influenced Yeats throughout The Tower and how he reflects upon his feelings though these poems. “Leda and The Swan” focuses on Yeats’s sole passion for Greek mythology and how he symbolises the effects of violence that are created throughout the structure and language used in the poem. “Leda and the Swan” can be described as a fractured sonnet because of the last stanza: Begin so caught up, So mastered by the brute blood of the air, Did she put on his knowledge with his power Before the indifferent beak could let her drop? (“Leda and the Swan”, 127) This is to show the breaking of unity …show more content…

He conveys this by crating imagery of death and blood caused by the war. Yeats engages his Protestant Ascendency background in the poem with subtle references throughout the poem. He mentions the Juno and peacock, where is an overlord with a farmyard or a garden with a peacocks as he says in “Ancestral

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