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Difficulty: Very hardAllusion and Intertextuality

Read the following excerpt from William Butler Yeats’s poem "Leda and the Swan" (1923):

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,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

In the third stanza, the speaker's allusion to "The broken wall, the burning roof and tower / And Agamemnon dead" functions intertextually to do which of the following?

  1. A
    reiterate the narrative sequence of the Trojan War, explaining how Helen’s abduction led to the siege of Troy and the eventual homecoming of Agamemnon.
  2. B
    express the poet's personal grief over the destruction of classical civilizations and his political desire to warn contemporary Ireland of impending military invasion.
  3. compress the catastrophic historical consequences of the mythological encounter into a single moment of violent origin, framing human history as predetermined by divine whim.Answer
  4. D
    suggest that Agamemnon’s death was an act of heroic sacrifice that successfully redeemed the fall of Troy and restored moral order to the Greek world.
  5. E
    employ metonymy and auditory imagery to embellish the description of the Trojan War, demonstrating a mastery of modernist poetic techniques.

Answer

The correct answer states that the allusion compresses the catastrophic historical consequences of the mythological encounter into a single moment of violent origin, framing human history as predetermined by divine whim.
The correct answer is correct because the allusion to the fall of Troy and Agamemnon's death is syntactically driven by the verb 'engenders,' which directly links these catastrophic historical events to the moment of Leda's rape. This compression frames history as a tragic chain of events predetermined by the indifferent actions of the gods.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify the literal referents of the allusion in the third stanza.
The references to 'the broken wall, the burning roof and tower / And Agamemnon dead' point to the destruction of Troy and the tragic assassination of the Greek king Agamemnon upon his return from the Trojan War.
Establishing the mythological and historical background of the alluded events is the first step in understanding the allusion's purpose.
2
Analyze the grammatical and structural connection between the allusion and the rest of the stanza.
The verb 'engenders' directly links the physical act of the rape ('A shudder in the loins') to these massive historical disasters, showing cause and effect.
This reveals how Yeats uses the allusion to compress time, bridging the immediate physical act with its long-term historical trajectory.
3
Evaluate the thematic meaning of this compression within the poem's context.
By linking the rape of Leda directly to the fall of Troy and the murder of Agamemnon, the speaker frames history not as a series of rational human choices, but as a deterministic chain of catastrophes set in motion by divine force.
This interprets the intertextual function of the allusion, moving beyond mere identification or summary to find its deeper thematic significance.

Key Concept

Analyzing how allusions compress historical and mythological narratives to reinforce themes of fate and determinism.
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Topics

Allusion and Intertextuality

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