Fantastic article about the new Yeats exhibit going on at the National Library in Dublin – which will (pretty please) eventually come to the States, if a library/museum steps up to the plate to host it. (That’s one of the best things, I have to say, about living where I do – even though it’s the stinky sticky sweaty summer and there is much to bitch about, I know that IF the Yeats exhibit makes it to the US, there’s a good chance that it will be in New York.)
But anyway, back to the exhibit – which sounds incredible. Yeats’ lifelong infatuation with Maud Gonne is well known, one of the most famous romances in history – even though they were never married. He proposed to her, oh, probably 387 times over their lives together. She married someone else. She had a daughter. When the daughter was of age, Yeats asked permission to marry the daughter! Like: if I can’t have the mother, at least I can have her offspring! But that ended up never happening – and Yeats did eventually marry (when he was in his 50s) – NOT Maud Gonne … but you know, a passion like that doesn’t just go away. Maud Gonne was not a huffy standoffish person … she had her reasons for repeatedly refusing him, but they were kindred spirits, obviously – perhaps not meant to be married, but obviously spiritually connected in some way. She was one of his greatest inspirations. Well, Gonne – and Ireland itself. Anyway, I grew up hearing stories about Maud Gonne – my father’s bookshelves are lined with books about Yeats and the forming of the Abbey Theatre and his poems and plays and letters … The exhibit puts on display some of the Gonne-Yeats letters (and there’s also a touch-screen digital display which sounds fantastic … not quite as wonderful as seeing the object itself – but still – pretty cool) … and I am really dying to have a look at some of it. Gonne and Yeats felt they were “synchronized” through time and space – having the same dreams or visions on the same day, despite being in separate countries, whatever … They were truly interested in exploring their connection on that level – writing feverishly to each other, “I had a dream last night … Tell me if you dreamt it too.” Maud Gonne was not just a cypher – someone we only know through Yeats’ interpretation/obsession with her. She is not Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, a mysterious being that we can project our own longings and hopes onto. She was a fiery memorable being in her own right, a feminist, Home Rule activist, actress, intellectual, nationalist – with a mystical streak (of course. She was Irish after all) – and in a funny way (although it might have been quite tragic for Yeats) – the literary world should probably thank her for NOT accepting Yeats’ 592 proposals. Perhaps a happy and satisfied Yeats would not have had such a writing impulse, such a need to get it out. Who knows. Yeats was obviously a genius, his later poems show that – but we all have to follow a star, we all have unresolved things in us that cannot be reconciled. Yeats never gave up on Gonne, and accepted another kind of marriage – more worldly and earthbound – in place of the spiritual connection he felt with her. But their connection lasted always, to his death. It’s nice to see the two of them together again, reunited in the glass cases of the National Library in Dublin.
From the article in the Times:
Until nearly the end of his days he and Gonne kept an eye on each other. In 1938 he wrote âA Bronze Headâ about her frequent appearances at political funerals, a âdark tomb-haunter,â so transformed from the light, gentle woman of his memory.
Almost from the beginning she had been a figure of memory. In the opening pages of the 1908 notebook he looked backward: âShe 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.â
Here’s a link to the exhibit itself.
Here’s a post I wrote about Yeats. Maud Gonne comes up. Of course she does. How could she not?
