The language of "Leda" and "The Second Coming" is certainly magnificent, but the poems' themes are also quite powerful, and remain relevant to the experience of contemporary readers. Putting aside all the mystical jargon from A Vision, "The Second Coming" is a brilliant evocation of chaos and primal energy, and of a kind of eerie premonition: the sphinx "slouching toward Bethlehem" can be interpreted in many ways besides that which Yeats described. And "Leda" is a wonderful document of a violent encounter with the incomprehensible, the alien, the overwhelming, and of a turning point after which nothing will ever be the same.