The last time William Butler Yeats asked Maud Gonne to marry him was in the summer of 1916.
He expected, and likely hoped, to be turned down yet again. Gonne had rebuffed him at least four times over the years. It may have been because of his politics, for Gonne was a fiery Irish nationalist -- the first line of her Wikipedia entry identifies her as a "revolutionary, suffragette and actress." She may have considered the bookish, pacifist Yeats insufficiently committed to her cause. But the romantic notion is that she thought the poet might be domesticated by his muse, and that his unrequited love had been responsible for some of his best poetry. When Yeats complained that he was unhappy without her, she famously wrote:
"Oh yes, you are, because you make beautiful poetry out of what you call your unhappiness and are happy in that. Marriage would be such a dull affair. Poets should never marry. The world should thank me for not marrying you."
Yeats had pursued Gonne since 1889 when, on Jan. 30, he met her in London's Bedford Park and, as he wrote, "the troubling of my life began." According to Yeats' biographer R.F. Foster, Gonne appeared to him as "majestic, unearthly .... Immensely tall, bronze-haired, with a strong profile and beautiful skin, she was a fin-de-siecle beauty in Valkyrie mode."
She was 23. Her father, a British army officer of Irish descent, had just died. Yeats spent nine days (but apparently no nights) with her in London. Then Gonne went back to France, where she was carrying on an affair with the married right-wing journalist and politician Lucien Millevoye, a supporter of the popular Gen. George Boulanger, who at the time was considered a threat to overthrow the French Republic.
It's possible Gonne's fascination with Millevoye -- 16 years older -- probably had more to do with politics than romance. Millevoye espoused an aggressive brand of French nationalism that took a hard line against other European countries, especially Germany, and sought to recover the territories of Alsace-Lorraine lost in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War. He also hated the English. Gonne saw the Irish struggle for independence as analogous, and together they pledged to fight for both.
While Gonne was carrying on with Millevoye, she was corresponding with Yeats. She claimed to meet him "astrally" and asked if he was having the same experience. When she had a son, Georges, with Millevoye, she at first kept the boy's existence a secret from the poet, then claimed he was adopted. Yeats probably wanted to believe her.
Gonne next met Yeats in 1891, after she'd split from Millevoye and shortly after 2-year-old Georges' death. She asked the poet, who was known to be deeply interested in spiritual affairs, about various theories of reincarnation. She haunted the spiritualist circles of London and Dublin for two years before Yeats' friend, writer George Russell, suggested a way Georges might be reincarnated.
It involved Gonne reconnecting with Millevoye and having sex in the mausoleum that held the child's tomb in the town of Samois-sur-Seine outside Paris. And that was how Iseult Gonne was conceived.
We know this only because Yeats wrote about it in his memoirs, which were published in 1972. He wrote that Gonne told him the story and most scholars have no reason to believe she made it up. In 1893, Yeats -- who may have still believed Georges was Gonne's adopted son -- wrote "On a Child's Death," a poem never published during his lifetime about the child. It begins:
You shadowy armies of the dead
Why did you take the starlike head
The faltering feet, the little hand?
For purple kings are in your band
And there the hearts of poets beat;
Why did you take the faltering feet?
Gonne tortured Yeats for years, never completely breaking off their relationship. She slept with him once, in Paris, in 1908, and he wrote plays for her to act in and poems inspired by her. But by 1916, he'd had it.
Yeats was 51 years old in 1916 and ready to settle down. He wanted to marry. He wanted to produce an heir. His asking Gonne was perfunctory -- she was too much the political activist and too much the mystic to make a proper wife. Her estranged husband John MacBride had recently been executed by the British for treason for his role in the 1916 Easter Rising.
(Yeats refers to MacBride as "a drunken, vain-glorious lout" in his famous poem "Easter 1916," while conceding his horror at the sentence carried out. The poem's famous line "[a] terrible beauty is born" turned out to be prescient; the executions galvanized the movement for Irish independence.)
As soon as Gonne officially refused him, Yeats turned his attention to Iseult, who was then 21 (and who had offered herself in marriage to Yeats six years before). According to Yeats' biographer Foster, Iseult seriously considered the proposal.
Iseult deserves her own movie: Yeats would subsequently secure her a position with Ezra Pound, who promptly seduced her. Along with her mother, she'd run guns for the Irish Republican Army. And at the age of 26 she'd marry Francis Stuart, an 18-year-old Australian-Irish novelist whose work, while popular in its day, is all but unreadable now. He left her in 1940 to emigrate to Nazi Germany. Yeats referred to the marriage in his 1936 poem "Why should not Old Men be Mad," as he enumerated the provocations he had seen:
A girl that knew all Dante once
Live to bear children to a dunce
Anyway, Yeats had to marry someone. Finally he arrived at Georgie "George" Hyde-Lees, a 24-year-old whom he knew through the occult circles and who was recommended by his sometimes girlfriend Olivia Shakespear. He proposed and was accepted, and almost immediately regretted the decision. On their honeymoon, he reported that he felt feverish and listless.
But the marriage ended up as a qualified success despite the age difference (he was 52) and Yeats' constant affairs. In their first years together, the couple experimented with automatic writing, which George attacked with gusto, developing through her "contact" with a variety of spirits and guides a complex and esoteric system of philosophy and history.
George would outlive her husband by nearly 30 years. She was a fervent protector of his literary reputation who once told him: "When you are dead people will talk about your love affairs, but I shall say nothing, for I will remember how proud you were."
...
All this is necessary to appreciating Yeats' 1919 book The Wild Swans at Coole, which has been re-published in facsimile paperback edition by Scribners ($17). It consists of 46 poems, 29 of which had been privately published under the same title in 1916. (Yeats' play At the Hawk's Well was also included in the 1916 edition; it was cut for the 1919 edition.)
The title poem, the first in the volume, reflects the unhappiness of the poet after his rejections by Iseult and Maud Gonne, as well as his general depression about the state of Ireland and his encroaching mortality. He looks upon the swans -- "those brilliant creatures" -- with a heart grown sore. He follows this up with one of the major poems of his mature period, the formal "In Memory of Major Robert Gregory," dedicated to the son of his patron and collaborator Lady Gregory. The major was a pilot who died in a dogfight over Italy during World War I.
The poem begins with Yeats and his new wife "almost settled" in their home, a newly bought medieval tower in Ballylee, Galway. As it proceeds Yeats compares Robert to three deceased friends, each of whom embodies a virtue the pilot also displayed. Finally, Yeats emerges to comment on how his attempt at catharsis has failed as he realizes a poem is inadequate to commemorate a full life.
While "In Memory of Major Robert Gregory" is one of Yeats' better-known and often anthologized poems, it feels less powerful than the short poem that immediately follows it, "An Irish Airman Forsees His Death," also written for Gregory. It begins:
I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love.
There are poems ("Men Improve With Age," "The Collar Bone of a Hare") that approach the maudlin, and several love poems ("Solomon to Sheba," "The Living Beauty," "To a Young Beauty") that seem inspired by Iseult and/or her mom. But the most affecting might be "A Song," which ends with the stanza:
I have not lost desire
But the heart that I had,
I thought 'twould burn my body
Laid on the death-bed.
But who could have foretold
That the heart grows old?
As difficult as it might be to believe these days, a century ago W.B. Yeats was a sort of rock star, and The Wild Swans at Coole presents us with an artist in transition. It's kind of like Yeats' Rubber Soul or Revolver.
But unlike The Beatles, Yeats was more a singles artist. He's better served by the greatest-hits anthologies than by the disparate books he wrote. The Wild Swans at Coole has some major poems, and some minor ones a reader might prefer. It is elegiac and back-looking, written mainly in the midst of our first great world war. In some ways, it feels like a postcard sent not from the past, but from the end of time.
Email:
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
Style on 03/19/2017