Lazily she looks up into the sky and sees there the conflict between the eagle and her lovely, hapless swan. Pity (the mother of voluptuousness) is roused in Leda's heart and she opens her arms to receive the transformed god.
"Crouched on the flowery ground Young Leda lay, and to her side did press The swan's proud-arching opulent loveliness ... Closer he nestled, mingling with the slim Austerity of virginal flank and limb His curved and florid beauty, till she felt That downy warmth strike through her flesh and melt The bones and marrow of her strength away.... And over her the swan shook slowly free The folded glory of his wings, and made A white-walled tent of soft and luminous shade To be her veil and keep her from the shame Of naked light and the sun's noonday flame.
Hushed lay the earth and the wide, careless sky. Then one sharp sound, that might have been a cry Of utmost pleasure or of utmost pain, Broke sobbing forth, and all was still again."
There is a sensuous beauty in this poem which makes it altogether lovely. Certainly in thinking of the fable of Leda in the future our minds will first fly back to Mr Huxley's poem and that is probably the highest tribute we can pay it. But the rest of his poems aim at something very different from the simple, sensuous and passionate and are on a different plane.
He deals cynically with the transitory nature of human passions, he laughs at Jonah as he sits praying and singing on "the convex mound of one vast kidney" of the whale that swallowed him; in his philosophers' songs he likes to sing of man as "a poor degenerate from the ape" and of God as a fool.
"If, O my Lesbia, I should commit, Not fornication, dear, but suicide, My Thames-blown body (Pliny vouches it) Would drift face upwards on the oily tide With the other garbage, till it putrefied.
But you, if all your lovers' frozen hearts Conspired to send you, desperate, to drown-- Your maiden modesty would float face down, And men would weep upon your hinder parts. 'Tis the Lord's doing. Marvellous is the plan By which this best of worlds is wisely planned. One law he made for woman, one for man: We bow the head and do not understand."
This is certainly not poetry, but it is funny. The man with the wry face gets his laugh, even if we feel that to be facetious it is not necessary to be blasphemous.