Maud Gonne: “Strike Me If I Shriek.”

A letter from Maud Gonne to WB Yeats, in December 1908. Yeats had come to visit Gonne where she was living in Paris. After years and years of friendship (not to mention what they called their “spiritual marriage”), it is believed that the two finally consummated their long unrequited affair on this particular visit. Yeats had not yet married at this point, but the later Mrs. Yeats (a formidable woman in her own right) believes as well that this was an important visit for the two old friends, and that something sexual had finally occurred. Gonne had already had two children out of wedlock with a French revolutionary (one child died when he was only one years old), and then had married (disastrously) to another revolutionary, an Irish one this time, James MacBride. The marriage didn’t even last a year, although a child did come out of it (Sean – or Seghan, as it was spelled). Seghan ended up joining the IRA as a young man in the wake of the Easter Rising and living a life on the run. No surprise.

Regardless: Through the tempest of Gonne’s personal life (and she always found the personal life to be annoying – it needed to come second to her life as an activist and politician), Yeats had remained loyal, although he did have a couple of affairs (mainly to let off the sexual tension he felt by loving the distant Gonne for so long). They are quite open about all of this in their letters to one another. Gonne cautioned him against marriage (she wasn’t really “for” it in general), but she also cautioned him to not keep too large a space for her in his heart. She seemed to realize the sadness she caused him, and yet their bond was too strong to walk away from it altogether.

Whatever happened in December 1908, no one will ever really know, but here is the letter Gonne wrote to Yeats after he left. Having read all of her correspondence, (to him and to others) this letter stands out in tone and raw emotion. She often spent six hours a day on her voluminous correspondence, so her letters are quick, dashed off, to the point, and sometimes full of non sequitirs, like most letters between intimates. She lived primarily in France yet remained active in Ireland on all kinds of committees (committees she herself had formed) – so her correspondence was massive, and she employed no secretary.

Gonne usually addressed Yeats as “My dear Willie”, and sometimes (echoing Abigail Adams) “My dearest friend”. But here, in this letter, she starts with “Dearest”, a greeting that cuts me to the core for various reasons, so familiar is it, so unbelievably missed.

This letter hurts me to read. I think she has a point. I am grateful (in many ways) that she did not return his love – because the very unfulfilled nature of his love for her helped create some of his best work. She is everywhere in his poetry. Would that high-flung transcendent love have survived in the everyday domestic world? Or would it have been ruined? Was it not distance itself that created such a burning need? I can never know, and it is not for me to know … but her influence on him is paramount. The references to her cannot be counted. Yeats married quite late – I believe he was almost 50. He had a horror of growing old (he even proposed to Gonne’s daughter Iseult – when she was 18, 19 years old! – Incredible!) – and was also quite sad at being along so late in life, when he should have been having grandkids already.

But it took him that long to crush down the longing for another, and to accept the situation. He was “old and gray and full of sleep” by that time. That struggle took a lifetime.

She also was quite open with him about the fact that she had a “horror of physical love” (meaning: sex) – and only believed it was necessary for procreation. She knew that he needed “physical love”, and so wanted him, desperately, to “let her go”, to torment himself no longer for a woman who could never satisfy him. She was not a prude in any way (obviously). But sex was horrifying to her. She could not bear it, and didn’t want it in her life at all. She knew that this would be a problem for Yeats, although perhaps he insisted that it all would be all right once they got started with it. Or perhaps he said it didn’t matter to HIM either, and she was wise enough to disbelieve him. Sadly, only her letters remain (or most of them), because of a police raid that destroyed her apartment and most of her papers. Only a couple of his letters to her still exist. So we just have her side. But make no mistake: this is a true dialogue. One that spans decades of life. Until Yeats passed away in 1939.

They were dear dear friends. These letters are amazing.

Back to the letter. It is December 1908. Yeats has just left Paris. It is quite likely they finally slept together during this particular visit. When she speaks of “going to him”, she is referring to going to him in her mind. They communicated, long-distance, through shared visions and dreams, and made “dates” to meet up on the astral plane and then compare notes on what they both saw. Much of their letters has to do with this sort of new-age communication (this was what they meant when they said “spiritual marriage”). They experimented with it for years.

Maud wrote to him:

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

Yeats, when he was in his 60s, nearing the end, wrote the following poem. Many scholars believe it makes reference to this visit in Paris in 1908, especially the evocative raw line “Strike me if I shriek”. Whatever it means, it is fierce and intimate.

A Man Young and Old
by William Butler Yeats

I
First Love

THOUGH nurtured like the sailing moon
In beauty’s murderous brood,
She walked awhile and blushed awhile
And on my pathway stood
Until I thought her body bore
A heart of flesh and blood.
But since I laid a hand thereon
And found a heart of stone
I have attempted many things
And not a thing is done,
For every hand is lunatic
That travels on the moon.
She smiled and that transfigured me
And left me but a lout,
Maundering here, and maundering there,
Emptier of thought
Than the heavenly circuit of its stars
When the moon sails out.

II
Human Dignity
Like the moon her kindness is,
If kindness I may call
What has no comprehension in’t,
But is the same for all
As though my sorrow were a scene
Upon a painted wall.
So like a bit of stone I lie
Under a broken tree.
I could recover if I shrieked
My heart’s agony
To passing bird, but I am dumb
From human dignity.

III
The Mermaid
A mermaid found a swimming lad,
Picked him for her own,
Pressed her body to his body,
Laughed; and plunging down
Forgot in cruel happiness
That even lovers drown.

IV
The Death of the Hare
I have pointed out the yelling pack,
The hare leap to the wood,
And when I pass a compliment
Rejoice as lover should
At the drooping of an eye,
At the mantling of the blood.
Then’ suddenly my heart is wrung
By her distracted air
And I remember wildness lost
And after, swept from there,
Am set down standing in the wood
At the death of the hare.

V
The Empty Cup
A crazy man that found a cup,
When all but dead of thirst,
Hardly dared to wet his mouth
Imagining, moon-accursed,
That another mouthful
And his beating heart would burst.
October last I found it too
But found it dry as bone,
And for that reason am I crazed
And my sleep is gone.

VI
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.’

VII
The Friends of his Youth
Laughter not time destroyed my voice
And put that crack in it,
And when the moon’s pot-bellied
I get a laughing fit,
For that old Madge comes down the lane,
A stone upon her breast,
And a cloak wrapped about the stone,
And she can get no rest
With singing hush and hush-a-bye;
She that has been wild
And barren as a breaking wave
Thinks that the stone’s a child.
And Peter that had great affairs
And was a pushing man
Shrieks, ‘I am King of the Peacocks,’
And perches on a stone;
And then I laugh till tears run down
And the heart thumps at my side,
Remembering that her shriek was love
And that he shrieks from pride.

VIII
Summer and Spring
We sat under an old thorn-tree
And talked away the night,
Told all that had been said or done
Since first we saw the light,
And when we talked of growing up
Knew that we’d halved a soul
And fell the one in t’other’s arms
That we might make it whole;
Then peter had a murdering look,
For it seemed that he and she
Had spoken of their childish days
Under that very tree.
O what a bursting out there was,
And what a blossoming,
When we had all the summer-time
And she had all the spring!

IX
The Secrets of the Old
I have old women’s sectets now
That had those of the young;
Madge tells me what I dared not think
When my blood was strong,
And what had drowned a lover once
Sounds like an old song.
Though Margery is stricken dumb
If thrown in Madge’s way,
We three make up a solitude;
For none alive to-day
Can know the stories that we know
Or say the things we say:
How such a man pleased women most
Of all that are gone,
How such a pair loved many years
And such a pair but one,
Stories of the bed of straw
Or the bed of down.

X
His Wildness
O bid me mount and sail up there
Amid the cloudy wrack,
For peg and Meg and Paris’ love
That had so straight a back,
Are gone away, and some that stay
Have changed their silk for sack.
Were I but there and none to hear
I’d have a peacock cry,
For that is natural to a man
That lives in memory,
Being all alone I’d nurse a stone
And sing it lullaby.

XI
From ‘Oedipus at Colonus’
Endure what life God gives and ask no longer span;
Cease to remember the delights of youth, travel-wearied aged man;
Delight becomes death-longing if all longing else be vain.
Even from that delight memory treasures so,
Death, despair, division of families, all entanglements of mankind grow,
As that old wandering beggar and these God-hated children know.
In the long echoing street the laughing dancers throng,
The bride is catried to the bridegroom’s chamber
through torchlight and tumultuous song;
I celebrate the silent kiss that ends short life or long.
Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say;
Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have
looked into the eye of day;
The second best’s a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.