Leda and the Swan by Yeats

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?

I really like this poem; it's kind of beautiful, in a sorrowful, tragic kind of a way. Not that the story itself is pretty; a swan raping somebody isn't cool, but something about the way the words flow and melt in the air; it gives off something that just strikes a chord. Much like the final scenes from Iphigenia at Aulis. Even though the girl was being sacrificed (also not cool), her transformation into a deer, or the idea of her vanishing into the heavens- the words used to describe this was beautiful. It made me think of music.
I do think it is kind of interesting, how both of the evil circumstances, the rape and the murder, beget greater evil and destruction. Because Zeus bedded Leda, Helen and Clytemnestra were born. Helen is credited for the Trojan War, and Cltemnestra kills Agamemnon. Good fun. And because Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter, the Greeks voyaged to Troy to suffer great losses there and on the voyage back. I guess when Greeks want tragedy, it's like go all out or go home.