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9 Luci Tapahonso’s “Leda and the Cowboy” A Gynocratic, Navajo Response to Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan” MAGGIE ROMIGH In 1992 Navajo poet Luci Tapahonso offered the first positive poetic response to a question raised in William Butler Yeats’s 1923 “Leda and the Swan.” In his poem Yeats retells the ancient Greek myth in which the god Zeus transforms himself into a swan and then rapes and impregnates a young woman named Leda. Yeats’s poem, with its themes of subjugation and victimization, ends with an unanswered question: “Did she put on his knowledge with his power / Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?” (Yeats 1965, 211–12). There are many versions of the Leda myth, and these stories have long become part of the European literary tradition. In some versions of the story, Zeus transforms himself into a swan and seduces Leda. In other versions he rapes her. In another, she mates with her husband in the same evening, and two of the four children she later bears are sired by Zeus while the others are the children of her husband. In still another version, the children of Zeus are not from Leda but from Nemesis, who attempts to escape Zeus by transforming herself into many different animal shapes. Zeus, in the form of a swan, finally rapes Nemesis when she turns herself into a goose. She leaves the egg that results from this union with Leda, and Leda mothers the children who hatch from the egg along with her own. In still another version, Nemesis pursues Zeus as they each change into various animal forms until she finally catches him at the winter solstice and devours him (Yeats 1956, 837). These mythic stories have been depicted in literature, as well as other forms of creative expression. 159 Though Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan” is certainly not the first poem to deal with this myth and the images that it conjures, to students of English literature it is surely the most well-known of the Leda poems. It was the first English poem, moreover, to deal with the encounter between Zeus and Leda as a forceful rape. Since “Leda and the Swan” was published, no critic, scholar, or poet has offered a response without confronting the vital importance of Yeats’s final question . Ian Fletcher argues that “A strong reason why the poem will not let us rest are those questions: rhetorical? Expecting the answer, yes, no, or don’t know? Can one . . . resist answers, even ones that do limit by fiat?” (1982, 82). Scholars have analyzed and discussed the poem ad nausium so that Fletcher felt the need to begin his essay with the following: “‘One more word on ‘Leda and the Swan’ is three too many’ has been apologetically or defiantly intoned by critics about to commit three thousand. The brevity, force, ambiguousness, of Yeats’s poem continuously challenge, so I too join their number” (82). Trowbridge writes that “This question could not be translated as a declaration , for the poem leaves the question open. It is a oracular question, forcing the mind to think and the heart to feel, but baffling inquiry” (Trowbridge 1954, 124–25). “Perhaps it is a distinguishing mark of this poem’s enigmatic greatness,” Todd Davis writes, “that the interpretation of the question and the subsequent answers have been so diverse” (T. Davis 1997, 16). Throughout the critical discourse, however , there has been little consensus regarding how the final question in this poem should be answered, and though many poets have responded with their own Leda poems, only two have attempted to offer an emphatic answer to Yeats’s poetic question. One of these is Luci Tapahonso , who is the only poet to offer a positive answer. Yeats published “Leda and the Swan” in three different versions and in many different forms. When he published it for the final time, it was as an introduction to a chapter of A Vision, the book that contains the personal mythology that Yeats had developed throughout a lifetime of searching for answers to fulfill his own spiritual longing. The chapter that is introduced by “Leda and the Swan” is one that discusses Yeats’s belief that a cycle exists in which every two thousand years a powerful and usually violent annunciation, a merging of the divine and the human, takes place and creates major directional changes in history. Yeats sees the rape of Leda by Zeus as one such annunciation...

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