Leda and The Swan
Leda and The Swan
Leda and The Swan
Leda and The Swan - 42 x 29cm
This sculpture and accompanying drawings formed part of an exhibition at Kelvedon Hall in Essex in July 2025.
Leda and the Swan
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being 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?
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being 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?
I started making drawings of Leda and the Swan on a summer art trip last year. I had heard a reading of Yeats’s poem on radio 4 and it just became an obsession.
I think of Twombly’s painting; ‘Leda and the Swan’, and how it is freighted with all the violence of the war that would come to pass as a result of Leda’s child by Zeus, Helen. How for him, like Yeats, it was the seed of all that action and bloodshed; a single act of callousness that set in chain the fall of Troy and all that came after.