Yeats and Gonne

And loved your beauty with love false or true;

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

And bending down beside the glowing bars,

Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead,

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

William Butler Yeats met Maud Gonne in 1889 under an apple blossom, having never thought “to see in a living woman so much beauty”. He later admitted that at his meeting with Gonne, “all the trouble of my life began.”

Yeats was an acclaimed Modernist poet, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. His “mystic melancholy” form of writing was a direct result of his fruitless yearnings for Maud Gonne. He proposed to her three times but each time she bluntly refused, claiming that his unrequited love was the source of his brilliant poems.

Throughout their long association, Yeats and Maud shared a common spiritual connection. At several stages of their friendship they considered themselves spiritually married, meaning that they met each other through astral travel and in their dreams.

Yeats’ poem Reconcilation was written when Maud was isolated with lung congestion. He wrote:

There was also an interesting parallel between the housekeepers in each situation. In July 1903, Maud was protesting against the King’s visit to Ireland. When a detective tried to gain entry to her house, her housekeeper shouted “you double murderer, daring to touch a lady in her condition!” Although Maud didn’t know she was pregnant, the housekeeper had predicted in her tealeaves that Maud would have a baby boy, and early next year Sean MacBride was born.

I will now look at seven instances where Yeats’ works have informed and contributed to A.S. Byatt’s ‘Possession’.

Some topics in this essay:
Maud Gonne, John MacBride, Despite Maud’s, Golden Dawn, , Helen Troy, Yeats Roland, Association Irlandaise, Similarly Byatt, Garden Proserpina, maud gonne, irish nationalism, possession maud, contributed byatt’s, yeats’ poem, garden proserpina, roland maud,