【原文】
LEDA AND THE SWAN
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caresd
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can tho terrified vague fingers push
combThe feathered glory from her looning thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
全国中学生英语竞赛But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
郝彬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?
【THE TECHNICAL BEAUTY】（技术美，指用词方面）
To begin with, there is the structuring of the whole episode. The poem may be divided in two halves. The first compris the violent encounter of Zeus and Leda ending in ‘a shudder in the loins’, whereas in the cond both spatial and temporal perspectives widen into infinity.
This partition matches the division of the sonnet into octave and stet. Which is marked through the similarity of the two bold phrasings summarising the event in its constituent elements: ‘A sudden blo
w’ initiates the octave and ‘a shudder in the loins’ the stet. It also coincides with a shift in the temporal perspective. The octave is in the prent ten; the first half of the stet at once projects us in the far future ‘(Agamemnon dead’); from this vantage point we look back on the violent encounter (‘did she put on his knowledge…?’) that now is irrevocably referred to the past. And this binary structure is echoed in the grammatical construction: each half compris two ntences, each encompassing a single strophe, the first and the third of which are affirmative, the cond and fourth interrogative. The alternation of affirmation and interrogation goes hand in hand with a change in the commitment of the reader, who ems to identify himlf with the swan in the affirmative ntences, whereas in the interrogative ones he ems to ask himlf how Leda might experience her brutal overpowering.
Over this apparent articulation in two halves is superpod a cond, this time asymmetric, binary structure. It is marked by the typography: ‘being caught up’ is referred to the cond half of the stet. In the first half of this partition the unstoppable unfolding of the proceedings is depicted into its furthest conquences: everything is rendered in the prent ten. In the cond shorter half, written in the past ten, the deeper meaning of the event is fathomed.
A further counterpoint to the central partition is the shift in spatial perspective. No swan is staged, but
‘great wings’, ‘dark webs’, ‘his bill’ ‘his breast’, ‘the strange heart’ ‘the brute blood of the air’ ‘the indifferent beak’. And also from Leda we only catch a glimps
e of ‘her thighs’, ‘her nape’, ‘her helpless breast’, ‘tho terrified vague fingers’, ‘ her looning thighs’ and ‘the strange heart’. In short: a perspective familiar to all tho who happen to be cast by the spell of the flesh. Only with ‘body’, but foremost with ‘the feathered glory’ and its the counterpart: the ‘staggering girl’, does the camera em to zoom out. But it is only when we are faced with the conquences of such promiscuous entangling of body parts that we are allowed a panoramic view on the whole: ‘The broken wall, the burning roof and tower and Agamemnon dead’. Thus, the temporal partition in prent and past ten is joined by a spatial partition between the more involved clo up and a rather contemplative panoramic view.
真实的中巴关系As far as meter is concerned, it is apparent that the diction only unwillingly complies with the train of the iambic pentameter. We have to first witness the forceful resistance of the ‘great wings beating still’, the ‘dark webs’ and her ‘nape caught’ – an accumulation of stresd syllables wonderfully echoing the ‘sudden blow’ of the swan’s wings. But even when the metrical order ems to be restored, the asymmetry of the grammatical structure continues to oppo the regular flow on a more abstract level. Most conspicuously in that masterly - unforgettable - first half of the stet:
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
The rhythm determined by the alternation of adjective and noun as it is initiated in ‘broken wall’ and ‘burning roof’, is not carried on in ‘tower’, which has to manage without adjective. But the latter surfaces again in the conquent ‘Agamemnon dead’, albeit this time after the noun. Over the repetition in the word rhythm a cond pattern determined by the alternation of adjective and noun is superpod: a rotation from initial position to end position. To the unparalleled rhetorical effect that the whole procedure of begetting life is turned into its very opposite. To which we shall return below.
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Next to the word rhythm and the alternation of adjective and noun also the sonorous body of language is summoned up to evoke the encounter. Think only of the way in which ‘he holds her helpless breast’ unabashedly renders Zeus’ heaving. Not to mention the ‘broken wall, the burning roof and tower and Agamemnon dead’, the infernal sonority of which only joins the solemn stride of the meter to a veritable funeral march reminding of Wagner’s ‘Siegfrieds Tod’.
2012年四川高考题【THE THEME】（主题）
But let us first introduce the theme. The story of Leda stems from Greek mythology. Leda is the Spartan king Tyndareus’ wife. When she saw her chances, she did not hesitate to exchange her royal husband for a god: Zeus, even when he approached her in the shape of a swan. Which yielded her four eggs. Out of which not only hatched Castor a
nd Polydeukes as well as Clytemnestra, but first and foremost the Helen of the Trojan war.
From way back, the theme has been very popular in the plastic arts. It will turn out to be very fruitful to first examine how it has been handled there.
The reprentation of loving couples has always been a problem in the plastic arts. For the obvious reason that of a couple intertwining – Brancusi’s animal with the two backs – the most enticing fronts are hidden from view. Literature knows not such problem. When reading Ovid’s ver ‘ Leda is lying between the swan’s wings’ (Metamorphos VI, 109), not only do we e before our mind’s eye the pair of wings embracing Leda, but the body covered by the wings as well, not to mention the experience of the most diver bodily nsations. In painting or sculpture, on the other hand, we are not faced with malleable reprentations for diver ns, but with a concrete visual image. The painter that from the encounter of Leda and the swan would only show us the sight of spread out win英语口语考试话题
gs would not show at all: he rather would hide from view precily what we so dearly wanted to e.
敌人的英文The classical solution consists in staging the bodies immediately before their entwining. But such is not a becoming solution in the ca of Leda and the swan: we precily wanted to witness the proceedings after the encounter! And to make a picture thereof rais a lot of problems.
To begin with, there is the tension between the impressive figure of Zeus and the rather humble shape of the swan wherein he is transformed. Especially since the little bird also has to mount the huge female body. Before the mind’s eye we inconspicuously adapt the shape of the swan, as with the already cited vers of Ovid. But when the scene is graphically depicted there before our very eyes, the discrepancy between the mighty Zeus and the rather humble shape of the swan catches the eye. It must be granted, though, that the very same humble shape also yields an unexpected gain: the beast with two backs has on one side exchanged a broad back with a slender neck, to the effect that nothing any longer prevents the full exposure of Leda’s enticing front (e Corregio’s Leda, 1530, Berlin Dahlem).
But whoever might reconcile himlf therefore with the humble elongated shape of the swan, cannot possibly let it pass for the mighty Zeus. Unless he focus on Zeus' mighty member: only of this true
环保袋 英文
Adam can the swan be the becoming metamorphosis – the long neck then stays for the stem of the penis, the head for its glans, the winged trunk for the scrotum. And such life-sized organ cannot fail to head straightforward towards its goal: also in the real world the stretched out neck of a swan reaches to the genitals of a woman standing. Although the beak of a real swan, as oppod to that of reckless goo, happens to rather
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