Robinson’s “Madonna at Slieve Dun,” explores a similar process within the Christian theological tradition. Robinson, however, leaves no doubt that the girl’s experience was a violation: “She stepped out on to the road just in front of a tramp. ... He bade her good-night and took her by the arm. She struggled to free herself, but he held her tightly, and then she saw his face close to hers and felt his thick lips on her mouth and smelt the heavy smell of porter. She felt herself being dragged into the field again. Then she fainted” (MSD 7). While Yeats emphasizes Leda’s helplessness and the futility of her struggle, Robinson focuses on the girl’s struggle and her efforts to free herself. However, even this small element of volition dissipates into a loss of consciousness. For readers, Mary Creegan’s ordeal offers no questions of consentuality or mutuality during the rape, no possible joint orgasm or mutually beating hearts. The tramp in this story is without doubt a man, rather than a god, who ends the story with a laugh in a pub about his triumph over Mary. Robinson’s inclusion of the tramp’s story at the end of the narrative confirms that there was no divine annunciation to the girl: she was raped, and the tramp gets the final word. Just as “Leda” ends with Zeus’ “indifferent beak” dropping Leda, “The Madonna of Slieve Dun” ends with an act of callousness on the part of the rapist.

Robinson’s “Madonna of Slieve Dun” presents Mary as seeing the consequences of her violation as positive: “She felt very happy, she felt as if something most wonderful and tremendous had happened”(MSD 7). Ultimately, she comes to believe it was a revelation: “The Blessed child was to come again, not to Judea this time, but to Liscree, and she, Mary Creedon, about to be married to Joe Brady—was the chosen of God. She was not frightened, she was not excited, she was only very calm and very happy.” [Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, “Swans on the Cesspool: Leda and Rape,” in W. B. Yeats: Critical Assessments, ed. David Pierce, Vol. IV, East Sussex: Helm Information 2000, p.563.] The violation gives Mary a sense of mission, a purpose for her life that is in accord with her faith. Her psychological reading of the effects of her violation “liberates” her from the rape and the associated sense of helplessness, but nonetheless maintains her position of subservience to societal standards.

[...] Essentially, Mary’s instinct is good; she does not repress the violation. Rather she transforms it into an empowerment, if merely for a very short time. That she dies at the story’s end suggests that she does not achieve a true sense of liberation fromthe rapist; the consequences of his act of violation degrade her so that she cannot survive. However, she is able to achieve a temporary psychological triumph over her trauma, in that she does not identify herself as a violated woman but as an empowered woman. [...] To use Yeatsian language, Mary’s vision of her rape as a second coming of Christ begins the process of liberation of the intellect from personality; she prepares the way for the truemask. She dies before she can truly liberate herself; however, her act lays bare those repressed components of her consciousness that contribute to her suppression.

Her mask is so tragic that readers clearly see how she has internalized societal standards in reaction to her rape and, in fact, how those standards began the process of violation. To borrow Yeats’s descriptive term from A Vision that represents a false identity, they initiated the subordination of her true self to a mask of “personality.” As a child, Mary “would often come home in the evening crying, sitting on a sack of hay in the bottom of the cart, all because one or two lads in the town had a drop of drink taken and were quarrelsome and rowdy” (MSD, 1). She makes herself subservient to their transgressions, subsuming her identity in an act of sorrow and contrition for the sins of others. Her focus on the transgressions of her society makes all other aspects of Liscree obscure: “She had heard of God destroying whole cities for their wickedness ... and she brooded over the possible destruction of Liscree, until it seemed a doomed town clinging to the edge of a crumbling precipice.” (MSD, 1.) Her thoughts transform her reality. Initially, she takes on the sins of the people of the village, submitting her identity to an identity of a sinful violator of God’s law. She becomes sin. Subsequently, she transforms the town, through her acts of “brooding,” to a place on the verge of destruction. Her transformations anticipate a violent event, an intervention [28] by God to bring about justice. Adding to her sense of impending divine violation that will bring about God’s kingdom, the parish priest “called down the judgment of heaven on them” (MSD, 7) and placed the seeds of a second coming in Mary’s mind: “if the blessed child was born into this world and the miracle took place in the parish of Liscree even that wouldn’t turn you from your sins” (MSD, 7). However, Mary “was sure it would. .... If the Child were born in Liscree ... it was impossible to think that the people wouldn’t get gentle and kind.” (MSD, 7). The culture into which Mary Creedon was born encouraged her to blame herself for the violence in the society, to anticipate violence in return, and to associate that violence with both divine justice and the birth of a child. All the components for Mary’s efforts to transform her violation into a divine annunciation were in place, even before the rape; the rape simply catalyzed her thoughts. Robinson lays bare her psychological processes, and the injustice of a society that imposes punishment on the innocent and associates punishment with the sexual act of creation. By doing so, he exposes the repression embedded in Irish society and begins the process of true liberation.

The juxtaposition between Robinson’s “revolutionary” story and “Leda” brings out the same associations that Yeats would later create in The Tower by juxtaposing “Leda” with “Wisdom”: “The true faith discovered was / When painted panel statuary, / Glassmosaic,window glass, / Straightened all that went awry.” The “true faith” here is a false mask imposed on the reality of the tale told “When some peasant gospellers” related the story of the “Annunciation.” Wisdom, then, creates a discourse that dehumanizes the story of the Virgin Mary, just as the stories and theological teachings current in Irish society dehumanize Mary Creedon, whose name, it might be noted, suggests “belief” and “creed.” She both accepts the received creed of Catholic teaching, yet fosters a belief in something beyond the restrictive creed. She cannot fully escape the consequences of her internalization of repressive societal values, but her vision of a new beginning and Robinson’s contextualization of her vision within the repressive early Irish Free State, is a beginning of a revolution,“a first beginning of new political thought.” (pp.27-29.)