Reading from the Drop: Poetics of Identification and Yeats's "Leda and the Swan"

This essay examines Yeats's well-known sonnet "Leda and the Swan," beginning with the famous final interrogative couplet as the swan drops the raped female figure, in order to take up some implications of identification to a develop a feminist postcolonial reading strategy. Yeats presents a rape, but in the conclusion of the poem when he asks whether Leda "puts on" Zeus's power, he questions how exchanges of power between self and other might be conceptualized beyond domination. Following from recent criticism on Yeats that explores his work from a post-colonial perspective, this essay pursues the intersection of sexual and colonial politics in "Leda and the Swan."