In the second semester of my British literature survey, we students were given the opportunity to boost our collective class average by one-third of a letter grade if just five of us were willing to memorize and recite any poem of our choosing from the syllabus. The stipulation being it must exceed fourteen lines. I still don’t know why I volunteered. More than a hundred English majors sat enrolled in the course. Surely five other students would raise their hands.
But I was surely among them. The verse I selected, William Butler Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan” was arguably fifteen lines long (also arguably fourteen, who’s counting?), and one of my favorites. It’s also an ode to one of my favorite myths—I’ll take any godly transmogrification vis-à-vis bestial procreation (this one resulted in Helen and Pollux). Likewise, I’ll take any Yeats.
Perhaps it is not the best the sullen Irishman had to offer. “Easter, 1916” was needlessly long, and “The Second Coming” too familiar, I worried my schoolmates would think me trite. So I practiced in the kitchen, the shower, on the train. I weighed punctuation, diction, the stumbles and breaks, theatricality and symbolism and imagery. I wanted to push my A- to an A!
And like Leda, I got a little caught up, “caressed / By the dark webs.” “So mastered by the brute blood of the air,” and Yeats’s unforgiving sensuality in so horrific a scene painted the lecture hall red. It got to be I could feel the moment the egg surged, imbued with Zeus’s seed and knowledge dropping in, before his “indifferent beak could let her.” Fourteen years later, and I can deliver it all offhand.
Well, I’m alone now, divorce pending, listening to WFAN, and there’s an ad for having your eggs frozen. Extend fertility dot com. I watch the fires rage in little spirals. I watch the bombs explode whole generations in a rectangle, slackly hanging in my hand. And if that doesn’t feel like a centre failing… Haha. But truly… Metaphorically of course, and truly too.
-David Fishkind