Sherry Chandler

from Benjamin Schwarcz’s review of The Third Reich in Power, 1933-1939, originally in The Atlantic Monthly:

At its best, then, Evans’s coolly precise, profoundly disquieting history gives the most thorough answer yet to the question that will nag humanity for a thousand years: What accounts for the German people’s support — at times passive, at times fervent — for the vicious and often ridiculous thugs who ruled over them for nearly twelve years?

The Petrarchan sonnet form is divided 8 and 6: an octave that sets up the problem and a sestet that resolves it. Here is probably the most famous ekphrastic sonnet of them all:

Leda and the Swan

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,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

— William Butler Yeats (1924)

I was once rebuked for quoting this poem because it is so anti-feminist. And it is true that Yeats was not always on the right side politically. I sometimes feel a little antsy reading his work.

But for me the power of this poem lies in its language and in its look at the relationship of humankind to the gods or fate or the great tide of history or whatever you want to call it. Once Leda is raped, Troy is destroyed and Agamemnon is dead. Did Leda know? Did she have any choices?

The poem cheats. It doesn’t resolve. It adds a further question.