Yeats and Maud Gonne

 The poetry of William Butler Yeats spans fifty years. During that course of time, Yeats evolved stylistically and thematically. His early poems often reflect his interest in Irish myth, legends and tales. His later poems shift toward politics, the contrast between youth and age, the Irish fight for independence and civil war and his personal mythology regarding human history. The single most repeated presence in Yeats’s poetry is Maud Gonne, his unrequited love. In every collection of his poetry except one, is at least one poem alluding to or metaphorically suggesting Maud Gonne. Yeats met Gonne in January 1889, and soon after fell hopelessly in love with her. She was born in 1866 and became an Irish patriot, an actress and a feminist. She was a political activist, one of the founders of Sinn Fein and was fervent in her work for Irish independence from Britain in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She also was a successful actress and the heroine in Yeats’s first play, Cathleen ni Houlihan. In 1891, Yeats, asked her to marry him, but she refused. Undeterred, he asked her four more times, but each time she said they could only be friends. To his horror, Gonne married Major John MacBride in 1903, and though a “drunken vainglorious lout,” MacBride was one of the heroes of the Easter 1916 uprising, executed after the revolt failed. He was an abusive husband, and he and Gonne separated in 1905. Her separation from MacBride gave Yeats hope that Maud might finally love him as he loved her. That was never to be, but all was not lost since his heartache fermented much of his verse he was to compose. Here is an early poem, written shortly after Gonne first refused to marry Yeats; it subtly alludes to her in the second stanza.

                   The Sorrow of Love

The brawling of a sparrow in the eaves,
The brilliant moon and all the milky sky,
And all that famous harmony of leaves,
Had blotted out man's image and his cry.

A girl arose that had red mournful lips                          5
And seemed the greatness of the world in tears,
Doomed like Odysseus and the laboring ships
And proud as Priam murdered with his peers;

Arose, and on the instant clamorous eaves,
A climbing moon upon an empty sky,                            10
And all that lamentation of the leaves,
Could but compose man's image and his cry.     
                                                                                       (1892)

In the first stanza, it becomes clear that something regarding nature is amiss. The image of “brawling of a sparrow” clashes with the middle lines that paint attractive images of a “milky sky,” a “Brilliant moon,” and a “harmony of leaves.” Then, the last line bluntly states that all of these images “had “blotted out man’s image and his cry." In the nineteenth-century poets, such as Wordsworth, had proclaimed that nature could engender a “sense sublime / Of something far more interfused.” Nature had offered boundless possibilities for joy and artistic creation, especially for poets. In this case, nature has become antagonistic, erasing man’s identity and his speech. Is Yeats suggesting that nature can no longer offer inspiration or is he projecting his own dejection onto nature?

The second stanza shifts to a different subject. Suddenly, “A girl arose that had red mournful lips,” followed by the enigmatic line “And seemed the greatness of the world in tears.” Who is the girl and why is she denoted as “the greatness of the world in tears”? The simile that closes the stanza reveals her identity; she is obviously Helen of Troy, the “girl” who bewitched Paris and sparked the two great poems of Homer. Scholars of Yeats (and Yeats himself) have frequently pointed out that Yeats identified Maud Gonne with Helen of Troy. As you read Yeats’s poems, you will discover time and again this symbol (Helen) that he would most often employ to represent his unfulfilled passion for Maud Gonne.

Stanza 3 picks up the thread began in the previous stanza with the verb “Arose,” but then reproduces the imagery in stanza 1, only this time, “A girl” presides over those images and “rewrites” them in a way that reflects Yeats’s despair. The moon ascends an “empty sky,” and the leaves’ “lamentation leave no doubt that the presence of Helen now dominates and even supersedes nature as a force impelling Yeats’s imagination. For Yeats, Maud Gonne will always be his muse.