{"id":31230,"date":"2010-12-20T06:59:24","date_gmt":"2010-12-20T11:59:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=31230"},"modified":"2015-06-25T08:51:27","modified_gmt":"2015-06-25T12:51:27","slug":"happy-birthday-maud-gonne-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=31230","title":{"rendered":"Happy Birthday, Maud Gonne: “It Is To Be A Bond Of The Spirit Only.”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"FP20Maud20Gonne.jpg\"<\/p>\n

Maud Gonne, Irish revolutionary, feminist, radical, and lifelong poetic muse of William Butler Yeats, was born on this day in history 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 garb for the rest of her life. She was wedded to Irish nationalism. There was a bit of the death-cult about her.<\/p>\n

Conor Cruise O’Brien writes in his memoir, Memoir: My Life and Themes<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, about Maud Gonne McBride, and his memories of her from when he was a child:<\/p>\n

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’!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But of course, we know “of” Maud Gonne not because of these events (and she already would have earned her place in history as an extraordinary woman in her own right) – but because of W.B. Yeats’ immortalizing of her in poem … after poem …. after poem …. after poem …. after poem …. after poem …..<\/p>\n

It’s one of the greatest unrequited love affairs of all time. Great, merely because of the art it inspired.<\/p>\n

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

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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

Yeats and Gonne met in 1889 and he would say later that that was the year that “the troubling of my life began”. Oh man.<\/p>\n

Maud Gonne, of course, makes me think of Dad. On my father’s shelf in his study is a big hardcover book with MAUD GONNE on the spine. It has been there always. I have memorized my dad’s bookshelves, and know the spines of most of them, the ones that have been there since childhood. I own that MAUD GONNE book too (it is by Samuel Levenson).<\/p>\n

Samuel Levenson writes in his biography of Maud Gonne, Maud Gonne: A Biography of Yeats’ Beloved<\/a>\"\"<\/i>:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"Gonne2.jpg\"<\/p>\n

Ella Young wrote in her autobiography Flowering Dusk: Things Remembered Accurately and Inaccurately<\/a>\"\"<\/em> of her glimpses of Maud Gonne and WB Yeats:<\/p>\n

I see her standing with WB Yeats, the poet, in front of Whistler\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 Maud Gonne\u2019s dog, Dagda.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here is another of Yeats’ “Gonne poems”:<\/p>\n

Aedh wishes for the Cloths of Heaven<\/strong>
\nby William Butler Yeats<\/i><\/p>\n

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
\nEnwrought with golden and silver light,
\nThe blue and the dim and the dark cloths
\nOf night and light and the half light,
\nI would spread the cloths under your feet:
\nBut I, being poor, have only my dreams;
\nI have spread my dreams under your feet;
\nTread softly because you tread on my dreams.<\/p>\n

\n\"gonne_3.jpg\"<\/p>\n

On January 31, 1889, Yeats wrote to his friend John O’Leary, after having dinner with Maud:<\/p>\n

“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.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On February 3, he wrote to Ellen O’Leary:<\/p>\n

“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.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And so it began.<\/p>\n

“The Arrow”, one of the many poems Yeats wrote for Gonne, goes:<\/p>\n

I THOUGHT of your beauty, and this arrow,
\nMade out of a wild thought, is in my marrow.
\nThere’s no man may look upon her, no man,
\nAs when newly grown to be a woman,
\nTall and noble but with face and bosom
\nDelicate in colour as apple blossom.
\nThis beauty’s kinder, yet for a reason
\nI could weep that the old is out of season.<\/p>\n

\nYeats mythologized her. Not just her beauty, but her essence, her soul. Gonne was right. It was a “spiritual union”.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Gonne’s impressions of Yeats in that first meeting:<\/p>\n

” … 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 …”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"coburn_yeats.jpg\"<\/p>\n

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. Kindred spirits. In 1908, Gonne wrote to Yeats from Paris:<\/p>\n

“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.\u00e2\u0080\u009d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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 in a normal or domesticated fashion. If Gonne had married Yeats, would he have written all of those poems? If he had ready access to her over the breakfast table, in the marriage bed … would she have been elevated to such a poetic height in his consciousness? Perhaps Gonne sensed this herself. After one of his many proposals, she wrote to him:<\/p>\n

“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.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

She very well may have been wiser than he.<\/p>\n

Her commitment to his work was paramount. Marriage or no, they would always have that. <\/p>\n

In 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 went on to have a fascinating political life. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

This letter hurts me to read. I think she has a point. I am grateful (in many ways) that she did not <\/em>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!) – and was also quite sad at being along so late in life, when he should have been having grandkids already.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

She also was quite open with him about the fact that she had a “horror of physical love” 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<\/i>. One that spans decades of life. Until Yeats passed away in 1939.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Maud wrote to him:<\/p>\n

\n13 Rue de Passy
\nParis
\nFriday [December 1908]<\/p>\n

Dearest<\/p>\n

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 – !<\/p>\n

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! –<\/p>\n

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 –<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Write to me soon.
\nYours<\/p>\n

Maud<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

A Man Young and Old<\/b>
\nby William Butler Yeats<\/p>\n

I
\nFirst Love<\/p>\n

THOUGH nurtured like the sailing moon
\nIn beauty’s murderous brood,
\nShe walked awhile and blushed awhile
\nAnd on my pathway stood
\nUntil I thought her body bore
\nA heart of flesh and blood.
\nBut since I laid a hand thereon
\nAnd found a heart of stone
\nI have attempted many things
\nAnd not a thing is done,
\nFor every hand is lunatic
\nThat travels on the moon.
\nShe smiled and that transfigured me
\nAnd left me but a lout,
\nMaundering here, and maundering there,
\nEmptier of thought
\nThan the heavenly circuit of its stars
\nWhen the moon sails out.<\/p>\n

II
\nHuman Dignity
\nLike the moon her kindness is,
\nIf kindness I may call
\nWhat has no comprehension in’t,
\nBut is the same for all
\nAs though my sorrow were a scene
\nUpon a painted wall.
\nSo like a bit of stone I lie
\nUnder a broken tree.
\nI could recover if I shrieked
\nMy heart’s agony
\nTo passing bird, but I am dumb
\nFrom human dignity.<\/p>\n

III
\nThe Mermaid
\nA mermaid found a swimming lad,
\nPicked him for her own,
\nPressed her body to his body,
\nLaughed; and plunging down
\nForgot in cruel happiness
\nThat even lovers drown.<\/p>\n

IV
\nThe Death of the Hare
\nI have pointed out the yelling pack,
\nThe hare leap to the wood,
\nAnd when I pass a compliment
\nRejoice as lover should
\nAt the drooping of an eye,
\nAt the mantling of the blood.
\nThen’ suddenly my heart is wrung
\nBy her distracted air
\nAnd I remember wildness lost
\nAnd after, swept from there,
\nAm set down standing in the wood
\nAt the death of the hare.<\/p>\n

V
\nThe Empty Cup
\nA crazy man that found a cup,
\nWhen all but dead of thirst,
\nHardly dared to wet his mouth
\nImagining, moon-accursed,
\nThat another mouthful
\nAnd his beating heart would burst.
\nOctober last I found it too
\nBut found it dry as bone,
\nAnd for that reason am I crazed
\nAnd my sleep is gone.<\/p>\n

VI
\nHis Memories
\nWe should be hidden from their eyes,
\nBeing but holy shows
\nAnd bodies broken like a thorn
\nWhereon the bleak north blows,
\nTo think of buried Hector
\nAnd that none living knows.
\nThe women take so little stock
\nIn what I do or say
\nThey’d sooner leave their cosseting
\nTo hear a jackass bray;
\nMy arms are like the twisted thorn
\nAnd yet there beauty lay;
\nThe first of all the tribe lay there
\nAnd did such pleasure take —
\nShe who had brought great Hector down
\nAnd put all Troy to wreck —
\nThat she cried into this ear,
\n‘Strike me if I shriek.’<\/p>\n

VII
\nThe Friends of his Youth
\nLaughter not time destroyed my voice
\nAnd put that crack in it,
\nAnd when the moon’s pot-bellied
\nI get a laughing fit,
\nFor that old Madge comes down the lane,
\nA stone upon her breast,
\nAnd a cloak wrapped about the stone,
\nAnd she can get no rest
\nWith singing hush and hush-a-bye;
\nShe that has been wild
\nAnd barren as a breaking wave
\nThinks that the stone’s a child.
\nAnd Peter that had great affairs
\nAnd was a pushing man
\nShrieks, ‘I am King of the Peacocks,’
\nAnd perches on a stone;
\nAnd then I laugh till tears run down
\nAnd the heart thumps at my side,
\nRemembering that her shriek was love
\nAnd that he shrieks from pride.<\/p>\n

VIII
\nSummer and Spring
\nWe sat under an old thorn-tree
\nAnd talked away the night,
\nTold all that had been said or done
\nSince first we saw the light,
\nAnd when we talked of growing up
\nKnew that we’d halved a soul
\nAnd fell the one in t’other’s arms
\nThat we might make it whole;
\nThen peter had a murdering look,
\nFor it seemed that he and she
\nHad spoken of their childish days
\nUnder that very tree.
\nO what a bursting out there was,
\nAnd what a blossoming,
\nWhen we had all the summer-time
\nAnd she had all the spring!<\/p>\n

IX
\nThe Secrets of the Old
\nI have old women’s sectets now
\nThat had those of the young;
\nMadge tells me what I dared not think
\nWhen my blood was strong,
\nAnd what had drowned a lover once
\nSounds like an old song.
\nThough Margery is stricken dumb
\nIf thrown in Madge’s way,
\nWe three make up a solitude;
\nFor none alive to-day
\nCan know the stories that we know
\nOr say the things we say:
\nHow such a man pleased women most
\nOf all that are gone,
\nHow such a pair loved many years
\nAnd such a pair but one,
\nStories of the bed of straw
\nOr the bed of down.<\/p>\n

X
\nHis Wildness
\nO bid me mount and sail up there
\nAmid the cloudy wrack,
\nFor peg and Meg and Paris’ love
\nThat had so straight a back,
\nAre gone away, and some that stay
\nHave changed their silk for sack.
\nWere I but there and none to hear
\nI’d have a peacock cry,
\nFor that is natural to a man
\nThat lives in memory,
\nBeing all alone I’d nurse a stone
\nAnd sing it lullaby.<\/p>\n

XI
\nFrom ‘Oedipus at Colonus’
\nEndure what life God gives and ask no longer span;
\nCease to remember the delights of youth, travel-wearied aged man;
\nDelight becomes death-longing if all longing else be vain.
\nEven from that delight memory treasures so,
\nDeath, despair, division of families, all entanglements of mankind grow,
\nAs that old wandering beggar and these God-hated children know.
\nIn the long echoing street the laughing dancers throng,
\nThe bride is catried to the bridegroom’s chamber
\nthrough torchlight and tumultuous song;
\nI celebrate the silent kiss that ends short life or long.
\nNever to have lived is best, ancient writers say;
\nNever to have drawn the breath of life, never to have
\nlooked into the eye of day;
\nThe second best’s a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.<\/p>\n

\nShe seemed to understand where much of it came from (his love of her), and not only encouraged it, but pushed him even further. She wrote to him in 1911:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Love the gender flip-flop there. She as father, he as mother.<\/p>\n

25 years after that first meeting, Yeats would write:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Samuel Levenson writes:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

He made two observations, which doubtless owe something to discoveries he made as their relationship progressed:<\/p>\n

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<\/i> of whom she had seen too much.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

She was tireless in fighting for the causes she felt were right and just. She was humorless. She spent her entire day huddled over her desk, with revolutionaries and suffragettes and prisoners’ wives coming to see her in an endless flow. She organized protests, she devoted her life to her causes, which made her fascinating, but also a bit of a drag at times. She could not understand Yeats’ dedication to the creation of the Abbey Theatre, and she nags him about it, in letter after letter, over DECADES of their lives. It becomes a bore to read. Like, give it up, Maud, he’s going to do this theatre-thing, whether you approve of it or not! She always wanted him to use his art in a more revolutionary manner. Thank God he resisted those calls, because his art transcends the political upheavals of the day, although he is a very political poet. His commitment to the Irish Revival (as manifested in his poetry, as well as his encouragement of young Irish writers, and his work at the Abbey Theatre) WAS a political act, as far as he was concerned. Irish culture must flourish. He would help create that space where it could happen. But Maud Gonne was not an artist. She was a revolutionary. A political person from head to toe. She did not see the point of dedicating so much time to art<\/i> when there were real social challenges in Ireland. She didn’t “get it”. She had a huge blind spot, as many purely political people do. Yeats was amazingly patient with her impatience with him, and kept on doing his own thing, despite the never-ending refrain in her letters of, ‘Willie, if only you weren’t so busy with that THEATRE, you could get some REAL work done.”<\/p>\n

Jim Dwyer wrote in a recent New York Times article:<\/p>\n

Until nearly the end of his days he and Gonne kept an eye on each other. In 1938 he wrote “\u0080\u009cA Bronze Head” about her frequent appearances at political funerals, a “\u0080\u009cdark tomb-haunter,” so transformed from the light, gentle woman of his memory.<\/p>\n

Almost from the beginning she had been a figure of memory. In the opening pages of the 1908 notebook he looked backward: “\u0080\u009cShe 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.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A Bronze Head<\/u><\/p>\n

HERE at right of the entrance this bronze head,
\nHuman, superhuman, a bird’s round eye,
\nEverything else withered and mummy-dead.
\nWhat great tomb-haunter sweeps the distant sky
\n(Something may linger there though all else die;)
\nAnd finds there nothing to make its tetror less
\ni{Hysterica passio} of its own emptiness?<\/p>\n

No dark tomb-haunter once; her form all full
\nAs though with magnanimity of light,
\nYet a most gentle woman; who can tell
\nWhich of her forms has shown her substance right?
\nOr maybe substance can be composite,
\nprofound McTaggart thought so, and in a breath
\nA mouthful held the extreme of life and death.<\/p>\n

But even at the starting-post, all sleek and new,
\nI saw the wildness in her and I thought
\nA vision of terror that it must live through
\nHad shattered her soul. Propinquity had brought
\nImagiation to that pitch where it casts out
\nAll that is not itself: I had grown wild
\nAnd wandered murmuring everywhere, ‘My child, my
\nchild! ‘<\/p>\n

Or else I thought her supernatural;
\nAs though a sterner eye looked through her eye
\nOn this foul world in its decline and fall;
\nOn gangling stocks grown great, great stocks run dry,
\nAncestral pearls all pitched into a sty,
\nHeroic reverie mocked by clown and knave,
\nAnd wondered what was left for massacre to save.<\/p>\n

\nHere is, perhaps, the most famous poem Yeats wrote for her. It is impossible for me to read this without tears coming to my eyes.<\/p>\n

When You are Old<\/strong><\/p>\n

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
\nAnd nodding by the fire, take down this book,
\nAnd slowly read, and dream of the soft look
\nYour eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;<\/p>\n

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
\nAnd loved your beauty with love false or true,
\nBut one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
\nAnd loved the sorrows of your changing face;<\/p>\n

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
\nMurmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
\nAnd paced upon the mountains overhead
\nAnd hid his face amid a crowd of stars.<\/p>\n

\n\"gonne4.jpg\"<\/p>\n

\nHappy birthday to this fierce complex “pilgrim soul”, she who is so much a part of the warp and weft of my entire life.<\/p>\n

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