Symbolism favored suggestion, ambiguity, and musicality over direct expression, and Modernist poetry inherited its renewed use of classical myth as a way of expressing both private and political concerns. W.B. Yeats and Stéphane Mallarmé, two poets writing in different national traditions but shaped by the same Symbolist current, both drew on Greek mythology throughout their work, yet their comparative use of myth has received little sustained side-by-side attention. This study examines three poems in which that borrowing is most pronounced: Yeats’ “Leda and the Swan” and “No Second Troy,” and Mallarmé's “L'Après-midi d’un faune.” The study proceeds through comparative close reading, situating the poems within Symbolist poetics and within the classical sources and secondary criticism bearing on each text. “Leda and the Swan” is read as carrying two coexisting interpretations, a colonial allegory of England and Ireland and a historical-cyclical reading drawn from Yeats’ own A Vision, while remaining unambiguous about the sexual violence at its center. “No Second Troy” is read as recasting Maud Gonne as Helen of Troy to displace a personal rejection onto myth and, by extension, onto the politics of Irish nationhood. “L'Après-midi d’un faune” is read against the myth of Pan and Syrinx, which it adapts to dramatize a desire that dissolves the line between event and dream, with music rather than resolution at its center. The study concludes that myth gave both poets a way of saying more than their historical moment would otherwise let them say plainly, at the cost of a residual ambiguity about how literally either poet meant to be believed.