Author Question: Reread Yeatss Leda and the Swan. Does his retelling of that myth addan ironic dimension to line 13 ... (Read 54 times)

sammy · **on:** Jul 20, 2018

Reread Yeatss Leda and the Swan. Does his retelling of that myth addan ironic dimension to line 13 of Helen?

What will be an ideal response?

Question 2

Why do the other women know how to apply lipstick more accurately?What does this knowledge suggest about the difference between them and the speaker?

What will be an ideal response?

hramirez205 · **Reply #1 on:** Jul 20, 2018

Answer to Question 1

If one reads Helen in the context of Yeatss Leda and the Swan (which H.D. would almost certainly have been familiar with), the line Gods daughter, born of love takes on a bitterly ironic dimension. As Camille Paglia writes in her analysis of Yeatss sonnet:

Zeus, the amorous king of the gods, swoops down in disguise from Olympus to take his pleasure, but the girl he targets experiences his desire as assault and battery. . . . The myth of Leda and the swan was a popular romantic theme in Renaissance art (Leonardo and Michelangelo painted it), but the tale was treated as a charming, pastoral idyll and rarely if ever shown from the victims point of view. In Yeatss version, womanizing is not a titillating sport but a ruthless expression of the will to power. (Camille Paglia, Break, Blow, Burn New York: Pantheon, 2005 115)

Answer to Question 2

They started doing such things at an earlier agewhich suggests that perhaps the speaker was a late bloomer, or perhaps chose not to use lipstick at one time in her life for political or other reasons. Her use of the words those women and these / women suggests that she feels alienated not just from expert appliers of lipstick but, perhaps, from more sexually attractive or confident women generally.