Maud Gonne: “The Pilgrim Soul”

Maud Gonne, Irish revolutionary, feminist, radical, and lifelong poetic muse of William Butler Yeats, was born yesterday in 1865. She married John MacBride (after a couple of notorious affairs and illegitimate children). John MacBride was an Irish nationalist who participated in the Easter Rising of 1916 and was executed by firing squad. Although Gonne and MacBride had apparently separated by the time of the Easter Rising, she wore mourning for the rest of her life. She was wedded to Irish nationalism. There was a bit of the death-cult about her.

Conor Cruise O’Brien writes in his memoir about Maud Gonne McBride:

When the husband, whom she loathed, was shot by a British firing squad after the Easter Rising, Madame MacBride – as she now came to be known – attired herself from head to toe in the most spectacular set of widow’s weeds ever seen in Dublin, to which she returned from Paris in 1917. Her mourning for Major John MacBride was so intense that it lasted all the remaining years of her life (nearly forty of them), as far as outward appearances were concerned. I still remember her as I first saw her in that garb, about ten years later in Leinster Road, Rathmines. With her great height and noble carriage, her pale beaked gaunt face, and large lustrous eyes, and gliding along in that great flapping cloud of black, she seemed like the Angel of Death: or more precisely, like the crow-like bird, the Morrigu, that heralds death in the Gaelic sagas. That is how I think of that vision in retrospect; at the time I just thought: ‘spooky’!

Seamus Heaney writes about the mystical connection W.B. Yeats shared with Maud Gonne (a connection that he had all his life):

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.

They never married, although Yeats asked her multiple times. Later on in life, he even considered asking Gonne’s daughter to marry him.

Yeats and Gonne met in 1889 and he would say later that that was the year that “the troubling of my life began”. Yeats wrote 100s of poems for Maud Gonne.

While mainly remembered now as the eternal beloved of Yeats, she had a fascinating life in her own right. It was her birthday yesterday. On my father’s shelf in his study is a thick book called MAUD GONNE and I pull it out this morning, snow outside the windows, in honor of her – and, by association, in honor of my father, who used to tell me stories about Yeats and Gonne. He knows everything about these people and when he tells their stories, they come alive. And I find that I have memorized his bookshelves in my mind. “Now wait a minute … where is that Maud Gonne book??”

Samuel Levenson writes in his book:

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.

Here is another of Yeats’ “Gonne poems”:

Aedh wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
by William Butler Yeats

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.

On January 31, 1889, Yeats wrote to his friend John O’Leary, after having dinner with Maud:

“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.”

And so it began.

“The Arrow”, one of the many poems Yeats wrote for Gonne, goes:

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.

Yeats mythologized her. Not just her beauty, but her essence, her soul. Gonne was right. It was a “spiritual union”.

Gonne didn’t have as clear a memory of their first meeting. At that point, she was far more formidable than he was. He was 23 years old, a young poet, a nobody. She had already lived in Paris, had become notorious, was at the forefront of the new movement that Yeats would eventually help 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 …”

They were never not in touch, through their long lives. They wrote long letters to one another, describing their dreams – wondering if the other had dreamt the same thing. 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.”

Connection across the space-time continuum? They would experiment with it, wondering if the connection could be felt. I often think that unrequited love is far better for art than anything that works out. If Gonne had married Yeats, would he have written all of those poems? If he had ready access to her in a domesticated fashion … would she have been elevated to such a poetic height? Perhaps Gonne sensed this herself. I don’t know. It’s not for me to know. All we have is their letters, and his poems.

25 years after that first meeting, Yeats would write:

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.

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:

Until nearly the end of his days he and Gonne kept an eye on each other. In 1938 he wrote “A Bronze Head” about her frequent appearances at political funerals, a “dark tomb-haunter,” 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: “She 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.”

A Bronze Head

HERE at right of the entrance this bronze head,
Human, superhuman, a bird’s round eye,
Everything else withered and mummy-dead.
What great tomb-haunter sweeps the distant sky
(Something may linger there though all else die;)
And finds there nothing to make its tetror less
i{Hysterica passio} of its own emptiness?

No dark tomb-haunter once; her form all full
As though with magnanimity of light,
Yet a most gentle woman; who can tell
Which of her forms has shown her substance right?
Or maybe substance can be composite,
profound McTaggart thought so, and in a breath
A mouthful held the extreme of life and death.

But even at the starting-post, all sleek and new,
I saw the wildness in her and I thought
A vision of terror that it must live through
Had shattered her soul. Propinquity had brought
Imagiation to that pitch where it casts out
All that is not itself: I had grown wild
And wandered murmuring everywhere, ‘My child, my
child! ‘

Or else I thought her supernatural;
As though a sterner eye looked through her eye
On this foul world in its decline and fall;
On gangling stocks grown great, great stocks run dry,
Ancestral pearls all pitched into a sty,
Heroic reverie mocked by clown and knave,
And wondered what was left for massacre to save.

Here is, perhaps, the most famous poem Yeats wrote for her. It is impossible for me to read this without tears coming to my eyes.

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.

More on the fascinating Maud Gonne here.