What is a king to a god Even if that god has committed...

What is a king to a god? Even if that god has committed unspeakable acts? Leda and the Swan is a poem that causes a lot controversy; some people feel that Zeus raped Leda where as others feel that she was seduced. William Butler Yeats officially published this poem in 1928. He was known as one of the world’s greatest authors of his time. Yeats was born in Sandymount, Republic of Ireland on June 13,1865 and lived to be 74 years old. He was very proud of his Irish nationality and â€Å"maintained his cultural roots, featuring Irish legends and heroes in many of his poems and plays.† (William Butler Yeats). He moved from Ireland to English for an extended amount of time, but later returned to Ireland after the â€Å"Easter Rising, which was an†¦show more content†¦Greek mythology was the Greek religion; it explained life, death and the entirety of the world to them. Some scholars wonder if the Leda and the Swan was a way Yeats used to show how he truly felt abou t Ireland’s downward spiral; how the English were destroying their culture and way of life. Scholars developed this theory based on the social-political issues going on between England and Ireland at the time the poem was written. Leda and the Swan is written as a sonnet. The particular type used by Yeats is referred to as a Petrarchan sonnet; a sonnet is defined as â€Å"†¦a fourteen-lined poem divided into unequal parts.† (â€Å"Kennedy, X J, and Dana Gioia.†). There are multiple types of sonnets, such as Italian sonnet, English sonnet, etc. Yeats was very creative in the sense that he starts out with an English style sonnet and then switches to an Italian style sonnet as the poem develops. The general rhyming scheme that Leda and the Swan has is: ABAB CDCD EFGEFG. In sonnets, there is something known as the â€Å"turn† which is when the entire poem shifts from talking about one thing to something else. In Leda and the Swan, this turn is when it goes from talking about Leda and the swan to the Trojan War. The poem would be quite confusing to any reader that doesn’t understand that it is about Greek mythos and written in the sonnet style. The wording itself isn’t hard to grasp. The real challenge is the understanding of the background story of