W.B. Yeats, “Leda And The Swan”

by Mallory Ortberg · March 3, 2016

Originally.

Look, I have a lot of other stuff on my mind, too, I just –
some nights I can’t sleep and yes, one of the thoughts
that enters my head is: What if God were a swan and you had to fuck him?
And I can’t apologize for that,
or won’t. Either, both.

Hand to God, I’ll get to the Irish Literary Revival later. I just.
Am I supposed to apologize for this? Because I won’t.
Do you think that, when they prayed – if they prayed –
the Greeks were picturing God as a fuck-swan? Or did he look human, then?
This is all poetry, this is all art.
The devil is God inverted. What is the opposite of a God-swan fucking:
a god-swan not fucking? or an ungodded swan getting fucked?

I can’t not think about it. They teach you this in school. School!
Do you think she liked it? Where would it even…man.
I don’t know. I don’t know.
I wouldn’t like it, for what it’s worth. No matter how much God it was.
I don’t think that I could fuck a swan. It’s the Irish in me.
(Don’t tell me you never think about it! Fuck you, you do.)
How do you explain the Trojan War to your kids, if you had to?
“Some lady fucked a swan and that’s why your father’s dead”? Because
that’s the gist of it. And that’s really upsetting.

I think it’s important to think about it. It’s probably
the biggest question of the twentieth century. Or at least
Camille Paglia is going to think so. What if you fucked a swan.
Can’t be scared to ask the big questions.
I just don’t think I would have liked it, is all.
I don’t think I could have fucked a swan. Anyhow.

Mallory is an Editor of The Toast.


58 Comments

      1. steveramstad +62

        Look I’m not going to google swan penii right now so if someone could just offer a description, a genital spoiler, I’d appreciate it more than i probably should

        1. backupandround +23

          Googling was actually surprisingly unhelpful? Mostly related to duck penises, so idk, I guess they’re similar? Which basically means that they are way too long and corkscrew shaped, and thus utterly terrifying.

        2. LeastBittern +11

          A corkscrew, about as thick as a finger and as long as a swan neck, with the texture of a starfish.

    3. jennycieplak +13

      UGH you guys I am at work and thus can’t google this right now………. 🙁 🙁 🙁 🙁

    4. jennycieplak +50

      OK I just google image searched Leda and the Swan and frankly that was porny enough. Dude, renaissance painters were PERVS!

    5. LdotIdot +12

      So, I know a lot of people find it understandably irritating to have their language corrected, so before I say anything else: what follows is a pedantic observation about the morphology of the Latin word “penis”, please feel free to disregard.

      For those who are interested: nouns in Latin grammar are divided (for learners’ convenience) in groups called “declensions”. Every group behaves differently from a grammatical point of view; among other things, every group takes a different word ending to indicate the plural. The word “penis”, in Latin, belongs to a declension where the plural is marked by “es”, not “i”, so the plural of “penis” is “penes”. So, if you want to use the Latin plural, there you go: penes.

      Sorry about this, but I took waaaay too many years of Latin in high school and… I’m just happier when the people around me know about Latin morphology. Then if they choose to intentionally disregard it at least I know they’re making a conscious choice. 🙂

  2. ScarlettHairdye +188

    I read a lot of Greek Mythology as a kid, and basically I was 100% on the side of Artemis, who was just like “I WANT NO PART OF THIS FLIM-FLAMMERY” and then went off to hang out with ladies in the woods and never ever be around dudes.

    1. AliceIsHopeless +126

      As a child growing up on myths I honestly thought I’d spend more time fending off gods disguised as animals

      1. lauragraceroberts +129

        Or just fending off gods generally? Like Daphne, all BRB TURNING INTO A TREE

        I mean that’s a sick burn: I would literally rather be FLORA than be with you.

        1. TheasyPeasy +69

          But the worst part about that is that you can read Apollo taking the laurel as his sigil of sorts as an act of sexual assault. Even when she gets transformed into a goddamn tree Apollo is all “BUT MY PENIS MUST HAVE WHAT IT MUST HAVE. I’LL WEAR YOUR HAIR/LEAVES AS MY CROWN. FUCK YOU.”

      2. ScarlettHairdye +89

        I’m pretty glad that’s not how it worked out, but I really wish I could turn dudes into deer and then watch them get hunted by their own dogs.

      3. Megan Knight +71

        I was raised Catholic, I was too busy imagining the soldiers/infidels/whatever coming in the night and having to either a) pretend to believe in god and then be martyred (or raped and then martyred), or b) denying god, and then being exposed to my whole community as a faithless whore (no, I didn’t know what a whore was).

        How in the world is the story of St Maria Goretti an appropriate one to tell anyone, much less young girls?

        1. AliceIsHopeless +94

          I know someone who was afraid of birds, because she didn’t want to be the next Virgin Mary.

          Whatever you tell kids, they’ll take it to an unexpected place.

        2. Rocketship +34

          Raised Catholic here too! I STILL think about St. Lucy all the time. Plucking out her eyes and sending them to her suitor on a silver platter. If that isn’t the best fuck-you of all time, I’m not sure I know what is.

          “Oh, you think my eyes are pretty? Here, have ’em. Still wanna bone? I didn’t think so.” *strides into the sunset like a total badass*

          Maybe that’s not exactly how it went, or how it went at all, but that’s the story I prefer to believe. Probably not exactly the values they were hoping to instill in a good little Catholic girl.

          1. WiScourge +8

            And then there is St. Cecilia.

            “Yeah, I’ll go through with this marriage, but I’m not having sex with you. And you’re converting. And so is your brother. Make it so.”

    2. rawrbook +65

      Artemis was the best, and as a kid it was to my continuing disappointment that there was so much myth with the dudes wrecking shit and not more of Artemis being awesome. Basically, greek mythology would be 1000% better if minimal dudes were involved.

      1. ScarlettHairdye +85

        I bet there’s like version of Greek mythology told by women to women and it’s way better than the one we got.

        1. alder_tree +48

          Once Upon a Time I read a book of Greek myths re-imagined as women were more likely to tell the stories–my personal fave was one where Persephone decided to leave Demeter and become Queen of the Underworld instead of being kidnapped. The author pointed out that we genuinely don’t know, because it was dudes who wrote down the versions we have, so it’s entirely possible.

          2. Jen +4

            I JUST Googled did Persephone fall in love with Hades eventually. I think she did, and that the whole myth can be read with just the faintest hint of Rapunzel overtones. Not that Hades is not an asshole.

        2. Hadrosaur +3

          Weight by Jeanette Winterson is like that, but it is mostly about men. They’re just written to be really obnoxious.

    3. pigeonsquid +10

      HAVE YOU HEARD THE ONE WHERE ZEUS DISGUISES HIMSELF AS ARTEMIS TO SEDUCE CALLISTO. Zeus ruined everything, all the time, forever.

  4. danelleorange +15

    I feel myths really undersold dude-bros in favor of gods disguised as animals….

    ….

    well, shit.

  5. Orla +44

    I spent waaaaay too long trying to puzzle all of this out when I had to study that poem at age 14. Yes, they fucking do teach it at school, but try desperately to gloss over the whole rape and swan dick vs female anatomy thing.

    Also, as a direct result of this poem, I was convinced the phrase “perne in a gyre” from Sailing to Byzantium had some hidden kink-riddled meaning that the nuns were keeping from us. Thank you, Willie B Yeats.

  7. rawrbook +110

    The first read through I thought this was Byron again and I was like “Pft, Byron you would totally f*ck a swan, don’t lie.”

      1. rawrbook +20

        Hahaha, Kate Beaton is always on point!

        And for future reference, to paste an image first it needs a url that ends in a .jpg or .gif file extension.

        then you use this html formula < img src = ” web address .jpg” > without the spaces

        1. aintnothingtoit +9

          Thank you so much for explaining that. I felt too lame to ask in Open Thread and my googling was fruitless, fruitless I tell’s ya!

  8. Pola_Negroni +38

    Okay, so at what point did we, as women, switch over from Swan Sexing (as per Classical art) to Dog Sexing (as per MRAs on the internet). I feel like that would’ve been a pretty interesting transition. Were there meetings involved? Are the minutes available?

  9. LovecraftInBrooklyn +15

    There’s an Angela Carter book that revolves a Leda and the Swan puppet show.

  10. dorianneemmerton +29

    I’d probably fuck a swan before a shower of gold. I mean, how do you even fuck a shower of gold?

    Or an ant, for that matter.

      1. dorianneemmerton +13

        An ant would certainly actually be best, on second thought. You wouldn’t even notice.

    2. megalesias +53

      I always imagined the shower of gold to function like using a showerhead would, except sparklier.

      I think a swan would be more traumatic.

      1. dorianneemmerton +11

        I love me a good showerhead but gold is solid, that would HURT. Unless is was molten, in which case it would be hot and that would burn. So much nope.

  11. EmpressofBland +40

    Counterpoint: birthing an egg, definitely more convenient than birthing a live human. I mean, I imagine.

    Also WELCOME TO SYDNEY MALLORY! Sorry about the humidity. You should know that over here we express affection and friendship through mild insults. (I have a Canadian colleague who genuinely believed we all hated him for like, months.) Just return fire in roughly the same tone of voice and you’ll be fine.

    1. hopelessshade +17

      “over here we express affection and friendship through mild insults”

      Mum never told me I was an adopted Sydneysider, but I guess every family has their secrets…

    2. AllanV +4

      Dunno…seems like birthing an egg big enough to hold a human would be worse than birthing a human. Let alone birthing two eggs, each big enough to hold two humans.

  12. Liz +11

    YOU GUYS. I just read the best book – The Just City, by Jo Walton – and it starts out with Apollo not understanding why Daphne would rather be a tree than fuck him. Then he goes to Athene to try to figure it out, and thus begins the amazing story. Time travel + Plato’s Republic = awesome.

    1. kayjayoh_ +4

      I loved that book. The sequel, however, basically begins with a fridging and I didn’t even finish taking the book from the library. Checked it out, read the first page or two, dropped it in the book return.

  13. overdressedandovereducated +19

    When I was a sophomore in high school we did a Yeats unit and everyone had to memorize a poem and recite it in front of the class. I will NEVER forget the sight of a handsome, rather jock-ish male classmate reciting “Leda and the Swan” with the aid of a large wooden swan decoy — caressing it and rubbing it on his thighs. Ever since then, I haven’t been able to think of this poem without giggling.

  14. Trixr

    Hopefully Auckland will be done with the 90% plus humidity by the time Mallory is in NZ.

  15. Trixr

    It's actually from the English, originally. They invented taking the piss as a form of affection.

  16. electroniccapital

    I'm not sure the swan relished it that much either.. But, you know, inexorable forces of history and all.