“But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you.” – Happy Birthday, Maud Gonne

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Maud Gonne, Irish revolutionary, feminist, radical, and, oh yeah, lifelong poetic muse of William Butler Yeats, was born on December 20 in 1865. After a couple of love affairs (none of whom were Yeats), and after having a couple of illegitimate children, she married John MacBride, the famed Irish nationalist who participated in the Easter Rising of 1916 and was executed by firing squad. Gonne and MacBride were separated by the time the Easter Rising came along. No matter: Gonne wore mourning garb for the rest of her life, wedding herself – spiritually and actually – to Irish nationalism.

 
 

In his biography of Maud Gonne, Samuel Levenson writes:

No one who knew her in the days of her glory is now alive. But many Irish men and women recall her in her later years as one of Dublin’s most extraordinary personalities – part eccentric, part heroine. They remember her as a tall, gaunt woman in black robes speaking on Dublin street corners about her current political or economic obsession. And they have not forgotten the stories they heard from their elders about her unconventional life in Paris, her constant cigarette smoking, the dogs and birds with which she surrounded herself, her affair with a French politician, her illegitimate children, her marriage to Irish patriot John MacBride, and the scandal of her separation from him.

Some remember Maud Gonne’s activities to house evicted tenant farmers, feed school children, aid political prisoners, find homes for Catholic refugees from Northern Ireland, establish a fully independent Irish Republic, and end partition between Northern and Southern Ireland. Few recall the names of the women’s organizations and publications she founded, or the number of times she went to prison. And some confuse her with another tall Ascendancy woman who took up the Irish cause after a fling in Paris – the Gore-Booth girl, who came back with a Polish count named Markievicz. But they all know that the word “maudgonning” means agitating for a cause in a reckless flamboyant fashion.

Maud herself wished to be thought of as an Irish patriot. She was hailed in her lifetime as an Irish Joan of Arc, and would have been happy to be remembered as such for all time. A quarter of a century after her death, controversy surrounds the importance of her contributions to the Irish nation and its people. The scandal that still hovers around her name has grown dim. But it is neither her activities in Ireland’s behalf, her unconventionality, nor her striking beauty that give her a place in history. It is, rather, the obsessive pursuit of her by the greatest poet of the era, William Butler Yeats. Her steadfast rejection of his proposals bit so deeply into his soul that he never ceased to fashion glorious poetry about her beauty, her talents, and the mystery of her personality. She was to Yeats what Beatrice was to Dante. And thus, Yeats made her a permanent figure of romance and myth throughout the English-speaking world.

Perhaps it’s not fair that she is remembered mainly as a muse, rather than for all the things she did in her own life. But this is how it goes. She just happened to be the love object of one of the great poets of the 20th century. What are ya gonna do. It’d be like Helen of Troy insisting, “But wait, look at all my other accomplishments!”

And so, speaking as someone who loves WB Yeats, and who was raised in a household where both parties were so present – and discussed – they may very well have been our neighbors living down the street … the bond between Yeats and Gonne was one of the most productive unrequited love affairs of all time.

In 1911, Gonne wrote to Yeats:

Our children were your poems of which I was the father sowing the unrest & storm which made them possible & you the mother who brought them forth in suffering & in the highest beauty.

Please note: she casts herself as the father and Yeats as the mother.

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The two met in 1889. 25 years later, Yeats referred to that meeting as “when the troubling of my life began.”

I was twenty-three years old when the troubling of my life began. I had heard from time to time in letters from Miss O’Leary, John O’Leary’s old sister, of a beautiful girl who had left the society of the Viceregal Court for Dublin nationalism. In after years I persuaded myself that I felt premonnitory excitement at the first reading of her name. Presently she drove up to our house in Bedford Park … I had never thought to see in a living woman so great beauty. It belonged to famous pictures, to poetry, to some legendary past. A complexion like the blossom of apples, and yet face and body had the beauty of lineaments which Blake calls the highest beauty because it changes least from youth to age, and a stature so great that she seemed of a divine race. Her movements were worthy of her form, and I understood at last why the poet of antiquity, where we would but speak of face and form, sings, loving some lady, that she paces like a goddess.

On January 31, 1889, Yeats wrote to his friend John O’Leary:

She is not only very handsome but very clever. Though her politics in European matters be a little sensational … It was pleasant however to hear her attacking a young military man from India who was there, on English rule in India. She is very Irish, a kind of ‘Diana of the Crossways.’ Her pet monkey was making, much of the time, little melancholy cries at the hearthrug …It was you, was it not, who converted Miss Gonne to her Irish opinions. She herself will make many converts.

On February 3, he wrote to Ellen O’Leary:

Did I tell you how much I admire Maud Gonne? … If she said the world was flat or the moon an old caubeen tossed up into the sky I would be proud to be of her party.

When they met, Gonne was far more formidable a personality than he was, with a much bigger reputation. He was just 23 years old, a poet, a nobody. She was famous. She had lived in Paris, her personal life was notorious, she was at the forefront of the Celtic-nationalist movement which Yeats would eventually champion.

Gonne’s impressions of Yeats in that first meeting:

… a tall lanky boy with deep-set dark eyes behind glasses, over which a lock of dark hair was constantly falling, to be pushed back impatiently by long sensitive fingers, often stained with paint – dressed in shabby clothes …

Their interests and passions brought them together. They agreed on much, disagreed on more. Gonne lived in the chaos of revolutionary politics, while Yeats focused on opening up space for the Irish writer in opposition to the British literary tradition. Yeats’ literary pursuits, of course, had a political aspect – it addressed being colonized, first off, but Yeats’ politics were rarely overt. Gonne thought Yeats needed to be more overt. She wanted him to be the “voice” of the cause. Meanwhile, Yeats was busy creating the Abbey Theatre, and nurturing young Irish writers.

Yeats fell in love with Gonne the moment he met her. Love was low on Gonne’s list of priorities. But what they called their “spiritual marriage” lasted their whole lives. They attempted to meet up in their dreams. Separated by the English Channel, they would check in afterwards in letters: “Did you see me last night in your dreams? I looked for you!”

In 1908, Gonne wrote to Yeats from Paris:

I had such a wonderful experience last night that I must know at once if it affected you & how? At a quarter of 11 last night I put on this body & thought strongly of you & desired to go to you.

Yeats proposed to Gonne numerous times (and also considered proposing marriage to Gonne’s daughter!). He poured all his torment and love into his work, resulting in the most memorable love poems of the 20th century, and ever. We have Maud Gonne’s persistent “No” to thank.

Annie West, an amazing illustrator out of Sligo, has done a series of illustrations about Maud Gonne and Yeats, my favorite one being the following, which Annie calls: “IF MAUD GONNE SAID YES.”

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I think Annie is onto something.

Maud and “Willie’s” correspondence is riveting: The Gonne-Yeats Letters 1893-1938. (Here’s a post about those letters.) The only mark against it is unavoidable: he kept every one of her letters while she – living a more peripatetic lifestyle, and often “on the run”, enduring police raids on her various abodes – did not keep his letters. So the correspondence, as it stands, is mostly her side of it. A couple of his letters to her survive, but not many. It is a great loss.

Gonne’s letters give a good feel for the openness of their relationship. They were not polite with one another. They did not stand on ceremony, or even knock at the door. They barged right on in. Gonne thought Yeats was wasting his time with the Abbey: her hectoring annoyance about the Abbey is a constant theme through literally decades of correspondence. She could not let it go. Willie, who cares about that silly theatre. Do more important work. (History has proven her wrong.) She HATED Yeats’ poem about the Easter Rising, and let him know in no uncertain terms. She didn’t care about art, not really.

This dynamic was a two-way street. He was also not shy in telling her what he thought. He was brutal about her decision to get baptized into the Catholic Church. He was dismayed and horrified. He thought her politics were fine, but the way she went about trying to achieve her goals was not. Theirs was a fascinating philosophical divide, and although we only have her side of the argument, his can be guessed at from her responses. Their letters show true intimacy and a relationship of equal standing. Only really good friends can talk to one another in these tones of rough raw truth. (I, myself, would have said to her multiple times: “Maud, if you tell me one more time to stop working on the Abbey Theatre, our friendship is over.”)

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They were fully engaged with one another through years of strife and revolution and civil war, through her sudden marriage to MacBride, through Yeats’ eventual (very late) marriage, through her bearing of children. They remain completely up to date on one another’s lives, and only at the very end do you feel a formality come into their tone. They have agreed to disagree about politics, and once they “agree to disagree” there is nothing more to talk about, really.

Seamus Heaney wrote about their mystical connection:

And all the while, of course, there was Maud Gonne, “high and solitary and most stern” according to one of the poems about her, “foremost among those I would hear praised” according to another, and “the troubling of my life” according to a famous sentence in his Autobiographies. The passion she inspired – and as readers we experience it more as creative power than erotic need – made her a figure of primary poetic radiance, a Dublin Beatrice, an archetype as much as a daily presence. Nevertheless, Yeats’s poetry, his politics and his involvement with the occult received an extra charge of intensity from her day to day reality in his life, and when she appeared in the title role of his subversive play Cathleen Ni Houlihan (1902), another kind of maturity was achieved.

Ella Young wrote in her autobiography Flowering Dusk of her glimpses of Gonne and Yeats:

I see her standing with WB Yeats, the poet, in front of Whistler’s Miss Alexander in the Dublin gallery where some pictures by Whistler are astonishing a select few. These two people delight the bystanders more than the pictures. Everyone stops looking at canvas and manoeuvres himself or herself into a position to watch these two. They are almost of equal height. Yeats has a dark, romantic cloak about him; Maud Gonne has a dress that changes colour as she moves. They pay no attention to the stir they are creating; they stand there discussing the picture.

I catch sight of them again in the reading room of the National Library. They have a pile of books between them and are consulting the books and each other. No one else is consulting a book. Everyone is conscious of those two as the denizens of a woodland lake might be conscious of a flamingo, or of a Japanese heron, if it suddenly descended among them.

Later, in the narrow curve of Grafton Street, I notice people are stopping and turning their heads. It is Maud Gonne and the poet. She has a radiance as of sunlight. Yeats, that leopard of the moon, holds back in a leash a huge lion-coloured Great Dane – Maud Gonne’s dog, Dagda.

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Two of Yeats’s “Gonne poems”

Aedh wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

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The Arrow
I THOUGHT of your beauty, and this arrow,
Made out of a wild thought, is in my marrow.
There’s no man may look upon her, no man,
As when newly grown to be a woman,
Tall and noble but with face and bosom
Delicate in colour as apple blossom.
This beauty’s kinder, yet for a reason
I could weep that the old is out of season.

If Gonne had married Yeats, would he have written all those poems? I think not. If he had ready access to her over the breakfast table, in the marriage bed … would she have been elevated to such a height in his consciousness? Gonne sensed this. After one of his many proposals, she wrote to him:

You would not be happy with me… You make beautiful poetry out of what you call your unhappiness and you are happy in that. Marriage would be such a dull affair. Poets should never marry.

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Through the tempest of Gonne’s personal life, Yeats remained loyal. He had a couple of affairs (who can blame him?), but never got too involved. Yeats and Gonne were quite open about all of this in their correspondence. Gonne cautioned him against marriage (she wasn’t really “for” marriage, in general, unless it was to Ireland or the cause), but she also cautioned him not keep too large a space for her in his heart. She knew the sadness his love for her had caused him, and she wanted him to spare himself that.

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It took him a long time to crush down the longing for her. He was “old and gray and full of sleep” by the time he married. That struggle took a lifetime for him.

I’ve heard people call this “creepy”. Or him “obsessive”. Or “fixated”. Or whatever. I guess these people never loved and lost? I guess these people are more resilient. I loved someone in my 20s that I can say – with certainty now since it’s been so long – I never really got over. I never recovered. This is so unfashionable to say now that whenever I have I get pushback. Okay. So you are able to get over things, you are able to maintain your sense of self and your philosophy even when you are disappointed in love. Good for you. I have never been able to manage it. And so I find none of this “creepy.” There was CLEARLY – if you read their correspondence – something not just profound in their bond but SINGULAR. It could not be replicated. Yeats couldn’t get past that. I really get this.

Gonne told Yeats she had a “horror of physical love”: she believed it was necessary only for procreation. Gonne was not a prude, but a casual robust sex life at that time was not possible for women, not if you wanted to avoid multiple pregnancies. Gonne, in her activist work among the peasant-poor women of Ireland, saw firsthand what a lifetime of being pregnant did to her fellow Irishwomen. She felt it was barbaric. She was right. And so she was like: Best to avoid sex altogether. Gonne knew, though, that Yeats needed “physical love” in his life, and so she wanted him, desperately, to “let her go”, to go find his happiness elsewhere.

Despite all this, it is believed that the two finally consummated their affair in 1908, when Yeats visited Gonne at her home in Paris. The later Mrs. Yeats (a formidable woman in her own right) believed that something sexual occurred during that 1908 visit. Gonne had two children out of wedlock with a French revolutionary – because of course! Maud was totally on brand in her choice of partners. One of those children died at age one. Her marriage to the doomed James MacBride barely lasted a year, but a child did come out of it, future IRA-fighter-on-the-run and Nobel Peace Prize winner Seán MacBride.)

No one will ever really know for certain what happened between Yeats and Gonne in December 1908, but here is the extraordinary letter Gonne wrote to Yeats after he left Paris. Having read all of her correspondence (to him and to others), this letter stands out. Gonne usually addressed Yeats as “My dear Willie”, and sometimes (echoing Abigail Adams) “My dearest friend”.

But here, in this letter only, she starts with “Dearest”.

13 Rue de Passy
Paris
Friday [December 1908]

Dearest

It was hard leaving you yesterday but I knew it would be just as hard today if I had waited. Life is so good when we are together & we are together so little – !

Did you know it I went to you last night? about 12 or 2 o’clock I don’t exactly know the time. I think you knew. It was as it was when you made me see with the golden light on Wednesday. I shall go to you again often but not quite in that way, I shall try to make strong & well for your work for dear one you must work or I shall begin tormenting myself thinking perhaps I help to make you idle & then I would soon feel we ought not to meet at all, & that would be O so dreary! –

You asked me yesterday if I am not a little sad that things are as they are between us – I am sorry & I am glad. It is hard being away from each other so much there are moments when I am dreadfully lonely & long to be with you, – one of these moments is on me now – but beloved I am glad & proud beyond measure of your love, & that it is strong enough & high enough to accept the spiritual love & union I offer –

I have prayed so hard to have all earthly desire taken from my love for you & dearest, loving you as I do, I have prayed & I am praying still that the bodily desire for me may be taken from you too. I know how hard & rare a thing it is for a man to hold spiritual love when the bodily desire is gone & I have not made these prayers without a terrible struggle a struggle that shook my life though I do not speak much of it & generally manage to laugh.

That struggle is over & I have found peace. I think today I could let you marry another without losing it – for I know the spiritual union between us will outlive this life, even if we never see each other in this world again.

Write to me soon.
Yours

Maud

Near the end of his life, Yeats wrote the following poem. This seems like a foregone conclusion, but many scholars believe this heartbreaking poem makes reference to that 1908 Paris visit, especially the evocative raw line “Strike me if I shriek”. (I wrote a post about that letter here.)


His Memories
We should be hidden from their eyes,
Being but holy shows
And bodies broken like a thorn
Whereon the bleak north blows,
To think of buried Hector
And that none living knows.
The women take so little stock
In what I do or say
They’d sooner leave their cosseting
To hear a jackass bray;
My arms are like the twisted thorn
And yet there beauty lay;
The first of all the tribe lay there
And did such pleasure take —
She who had brought great Hector down
And put all Troy to wreck —
That she cried into this ear,
‘Strike me if I shriek.’

The word “shriek” appears multiple times in the poem, in fact. The poem is long but it is worth it to read it in its entirety.

Samuel Levenson writes:

In his recollections, Yeats thought that there was, even at their first meetings, something in Maud’s manner that was declamatory, “Latin in a bad sense,” and possibly unscrupulous. She seemed to desire power for its own sake, to win elections for the sake of winning. Her goals were unselfish, he recalled, but, unlike the Indian sage who said, “Only the means can justify the end,” Maud was ready to adopt any means that promised to be successful.

He made two observations, which doubtless owe something to discoveries he made as their relationship progressed:

We were seeking different things: she, some memorable action for final consecration of her youth, and I, after all, but to discover and communicate a state of being … Her two and twenty years had taken some color, I thought, from French Boulangist adventurers and journlist arrivistes of whom she had seen too much.

Yeats remembered Maud Gonne as the herald of the movement to revive Celtic culture. “I have seen the enchanted day / And heard the morning bugles blow,” he wrote in his manuscript book.

Jim Dwyer wrote in a recent New York Times article:

In the opening pages of the 1908 notebook he looked backward: “€œShe said something that blotted away the recent past & brought all back to the spiritual marriage of 1898. She believed that this bond is to be recreated & to be the means of spiritual illumination between us. It is to be a bond of the spirit only.”

Here is the most famous poem Yeats wrote for her, one of the most famous love poems of all time.

When You are Old

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

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Happy birthday to this fierce complex “pilgrim soul”, she who is so much a part of the warp and weft of my life (Dad had a whole shelf in one bookcase devoted to her), she who inspired so much.

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16 Responses to “But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you.” – Happy Birthday, Maud Gonne

  1. Melissa Sutherland says:

    Ruth Gordon used to talk about Maud Gonne. Never got the sense that she liked her, but she certainly admired her and I think there was some envy there, too. Wonderful piece. Thank you.

    • sheila says:

      Interesting! Maud Gonne certainly was formidable. A lot of people hated her, thought she was wacky and dramatic, a troublemaker and a bore. Certainly “out there”, and perfect for someone’s Muse.

  2. Silverleaf says:

    Came across this post of yours today and what a joy to read! Back in the late ’90s, I had just graduated with a Celtic Studies BA and had every intention of going to do my Masters in Ireland on Maud Gonne. Sadly, no one was interested and though that dream died, I did go to Ireland and lived there for 5 years. The reasons for the disinterest became clear rather quickly; no one there seemed at all interested in their history, literature or the glorious era of Gonne, Yeats, et al. It’s nice to still come across modern reflections on all of this.

    • sheila says:

      Silverleaf – that whole era fascinates me as well. True giants were walking the earth – at least that’s the way it seems to me.

      A Masters on Maud Gonne – wow – what was your focus? She was such an interesting figure.

      Thanks so much for your comment!

      • Silverleaf says:

        I can’t for the life of me remember what I had intended to focus my studies on. It was so long ago. I applied to Trinity, Cork and Galway but they all wrote back to say Maud Gonne wasn’t a particularly hot topic of the moment. Oh well, I never tire of reading about her!

        • sheila says:

          // they all wrote back to say Maud Gonne wasn’t a particularly hot topic of the moment. //

          Hard to believe someone hasn’t filmed a sweeping biopic of her life. Seems like a no-brainer! Maybe someone already has and it’s just not on my radar.

  3. Orna Ross says:

    Hi Sheila, thanks so much for this and yes, I agree about the sweeping biopic. (And hello Silverleaf too! Great to meet other fans of Maud) I am just finishing a novel about their love story (actually three). Thought you might be interested in my crowdfunder. http://ornaross.com/secretrose. Really enjoyed your post!

    • sheila says:

      Orna – wow, thanks so much for that link – what an exciting project. I am happy to know about it now. Best of luck!!

  4. Cousin Mike says:

    Wonderful, Sheila. Thank God for you.

  5. Sheila

    I actually started reading Yeats because of you! And I started with this post about Maude Gonne who fascinates and repels me at the same time. Kind of like Didion, in the way that I can’t deny them. But also, hey man! back off about the theatre stuff! Or as you would say, Shut It. (that phrase makes me laugh for some reason) To show how immature Charlie and I are, we needed a code to use when or if we wanted to leave a party or escape from some boring event. And he said “Horseman pass by” Which doesn’t really work because we both start laughing stupidly when either one of us says it. Merry Christmas Sheila, Happy New Year! and thanks again for all the great writing.

  6. Beth says:

    “…express a life that has never found expression” Shivers!

    I knew of “When You Are Old,” and of course of Yeats generally, but didn’t know about any of this. I learned a lot from reading this post, with some poetic soul food to boot. Thank you!

  7. Steven Wilson says:

    I was obsessed with Yeats in my late teens early twenties and was quite familiar with their relationship. It was an interest I shared with a friend who became a editor of small town newspapers. He found a few lines of scribbling I had done and published it in a poetry corner.

    ESOTERIC DOGGEREL

    Though Keats was neat
    And Yeats was great
    The Twain shall never mate
    For Maud is dead,
    Dead and Gonne
    My poor William.

  8. Sue Fergusson says:

    A lovely analysis, but he also wrote For Anne Gregory
    “Only god could love you for yourself and not your yellow hair”
    Maude was blonde, and he was frustrated with her when he got involved with the Gregory clan.

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