What is the message of Leda and The Swan?

The titular swan is the mythological god of gods, Zeus and Leda is the mother-to-be of Helen of Troy. The Trojan—fought on the account of Helen—is to be viewed within Yeats’ somewhat cosmological view of civilization as occurring in cycles. The ultimate consequence of the vicious and violent rape by Zeus of the women who will give birth to the great beauty at the center of the Trojan War will be—ironically for Zeus—the end of the first two-thousand year cycle as it heralds the commencement of the Classical Age which would hold for two millennia until a different sort of rape—that of Mary by the God of Abraham and the conception of the Christ child insider her womb—would initiate the next cycle.