" The ringing assonance of end words "still" and "bill", "caressed" and "breast" all work to keep the reader on captivated as to what is occurring here in the beginning.
In the second stanza Yeats describes in these four lines how terrified Leda feels when she is smothered by this "feathered glory." But Yeats makes the reader think what is really happening. Is she terrified of being raped, or terrified that she might like what is happening? "How can those terrified vague fingers push the feathered glory from her loosening thighs?" Zues is described as a "feathered glory." How can a mortal, like Leda, stop a God like Zues from doing this? Would every woman act as Leda did or would they try and stop him? Yeats describes her thighs "loosening" to the swan. Almost as if she is giving up, there is nothing that she can do. In the third and fourth line of the second stanza Leda was questioned. "How can body, laid in that white rush, but feel the strange heart beating where it lies?" I think that she was not in the right mind at this time. "This happened so fast that not only was she terrified but not paying attention to the big picture (rape) but instead feeling his heart beat" (Levine, 254). This was very strange to her that she was not paying attention to anything else. .
In the third stanza it describes the final feeling that she has when this is over. The first line in the third stanza describes the feeling of both Leda and the swan. "Shudder in the loins," "is presumably a shared one"(Levine, 255). "The broken wall," "the burning roof and tower/And Agamemnon dead," "suggest that Leda lost her virginity and orgasmed"(Magill Book Reviews). Agamemnon was a soldier in the Trojan War who was killed by his wife Clytemnestra after she found out that he had cheated on her. Leda's encounter with Zues impregnates her with two children. Helen, and the other Clytemnestra. After Agamemnon's death, I think that Clytemnestra felt a satisfaction .