The Whole Mystery of Art: Pattern Into Poetry in the Work of W.B. Yeats by Giorgio Melchiori

Author:Giorgio Melchiori [melchiori, giorgio]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Criticism, European, Poetry, Psychology, English; Irish; Scottish; Welsh, Creative Ability, Creation (Literary; artistic; etc.)
Publisher: Routledge & Paul
Published: 1960-04-15T05:00:00+00:00

adopted by Mr. Huxley in his poem Leda, where the scene is so described:

A splendid swan, with outstretched neck and wing

Spread fathom wide, and closely following

An eagle, tawny and black. This god-like pair

Circled and swooped through the calm of upper air,

. . . Like a star unsphered, a stone

Dropped from the vault of heaven, a javelin thrown,

He [the eagle] swooped upon his prey. . . 1

If Yeats had read this passage, the images of eagle and swan could well have fused into one in his poem (see for instance the beginning of Version A: 'Now can the swooping godhead have his will'); as they had fused for the Italian poet Gabriele D'Annunzio who, describing a sculpted group of Leda and the swan in Venice in his novel La Leda senza cigno, writes that the girl 'is seized by the great swan of Eurotas not with a webbed foot but with an eagle talon fretting her long voluptuous thigh' (translated from the 'Licenza' of the 1916 edition of the novel).

But if we grant that Yeats had in mind a composite picture, it need not have been made up only of the two Michelangelesque works. He had certainly seen other works of art on the subject of Leda, and one at least by an artist whose paintings, seen during his early visits to Paris in the 'nineties, had fascinated him. The painter, for whom Yeats had an unfailing admiration till the end of his life, was Gustave Moreau, to whom he referred frequently in his works, listing him among the great symbolists, 'the great myth-makers and mask-makers, the men of aristocratic mind', alongside Blake, Ingres in the Perseus, Puvis de Chavannes, Rossetti before 1870, Calvert and Charles Ricketts. 2 Moreau left several versions of his Leda,

____________________ 1 A. Huxley, op. cit.,45-6; see supra, n. I, p. 150.

2 The Bounty of Sweden ( 1924), now in Aut., 550.

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