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Leda and the swan

Cultural  

  1. The subject of a story from classical mythology about the rape of Leda, a queen of Sparta, by Zeus, who had taken the form of a swan. Helen of Troy was conceived in the rape of Leda.

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W. B. Yeats wrote a famous poem entitled “Leda and the Swan.”

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Leonardo could bring a steely exactitude and transparent freshness of observation to a botanical drawing, like the star-of-Bethlehem plant that he drew as a study for his lost painting of Leda and the swan.

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Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023

Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.