Maud gonne william butler yeats9/9/2023 ![]() ![]() He was particularly outraged by Gonne's marriage in 1903 to John MacBride, an Irish nationalist who had gained fame fighting the British in the Boer War. Yeats, however, would continue to propose marriage to her until he finally married someone else in 1917. ![]() Gonne disclosed these facts to Yeats in 1898, at a time when their relationship had reached a new peak of intensity: what they both referred to as a "mystical marriage." Gonne, who disliked physical love (it was justified only by the need to procreate, she believed), felt that renouncing the physical side would elevate their love to the highest spiritual realm. The year before Yeats proposed to her, she had had a son by Millevoye, a child who died in infancy, and not long after turning Yeats down, she had a second child by Millevoye, Iseult Gonne, who was for many years passed off as her mother's "younger sister." But, despite Yeats's repeated proposals over the years, they were never to become husband and wife.Īs Anna MacBride White, Gonne's granddaughter and one of the editors of this volume, relates in her prologue to "The Gonne-Yeats Letters," Gonne was already involved with a Frenchman, Lucien Millevoye, at the time she met Yeats. They shared a passion for Irish nationalism, Celtic revivalism, and mysticism. William Butler Yeats met Maud Gonne in 1889, when he was 23 and she 22. She is the "Pallas Athena in that straight back and arrogant head" commemorated in a later poem, "Beautiful Lofty Things," and, of course, the aging woman tenderly addressed in the poem beginning "When you are old and grey and full of sleep," a piece written when the poet and his beloved were still in their 20s. "What could have made her peaceful with a mind/ That nobleness made simple as a fire,/ With beauty like a tightened boy, a kind/ That is not natural in an age like this." The poem starts with the first rhetorical question: "Why should I blame her that she filled my days/ With misery?" (1, Yeats), which establishes an emotional connection in between the author and the readers, so that the readers can sympathize with the speaker's grief caused by Gonne.ANYONE who knows Yeats's poetry knows of his long infatuation with the fiery and beautiful Irish nationalist revolutionary Maud Gonne: the latter-day Helen portrayed in his poem "No Second Troy." At that time, he was 24 years old and had never realized how much pain and torture this "apple-blossom" would bring him. Yeats recalled his first glimpse of Gonne: "Her complexion was luminous, like that of apple-blossom through which the light falls, and I remember her standing that first day by a great heap of such blossoms in the window" (Jeffares, 120). In "No Second Troy," the poet engaged four rhetorical questions as a poetic technique to demonstrate Gonne's dangerous and threatening beauty exerted on Yeats. ![]() Yeats's discussion of Gonne's feminine beauty is an important source for us to learn about Gonne. In this essay, I will analyze the image of Maud Gonne as being a dangerous beauty as well as a violent political fanatic, through a discussion of Yeats's two poems, "No Second Troy" and "A Prayer for my Daughter" as an evidence of his changing opinions of Gonne. Due to her ambitious and forceful personality, she finally resorted to violence and became a violent political extremist. The female figure in Yeats's poems, mostly Maud Gonne in a central way, is endowed with extraordinary beauty and dominated power not only in terms of relationship with the male but also in Irish political events. In Yeats's late poems, instead of merely depicting Gonne's physical beauty, he emphasized more on revealing the negative side of her extreme beauty. As being in a long-term submissive position in their relationship, Yeats's depiction of Gonne became more critical and rational overt time. Yeats experienced marriage rejections from her over and over again, which resulted in a great contribution to Yeats's beautiful and sentimental poems. ![]() Yeats's life, a woman named Maud Gonne had significant impacts on his poetry writing as well as his political views. ![]()
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