Ella Young wrote in her autobiography Flowering Dusk of her glimpses of Maud Gonne and WB 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.
I am glad THEY were able to find Grafton Street.
I just love reading about the two of them. It makes me feel lonely, but it connects me to something deep and continuous as well.
They’re magic.