Yeats was a goner for Gonne
I’ve written about the great poet Yeats before, and in this post I dealt at length with his attitude towards aging and sexuality. In it, I mentioned that he had a lifelong love for and fascination—you might say “obsession”—with the Irish activist, actress, and radical Maud Gonne.
Gonne was quite the looker, too:
Their relationship was nothing if not complex and convoluted. He proposed a number of times, she refused, but she loved him and thought they were soulmates (they shared a devotion to the occult, as well). She didn’t think they should have sexual desire for each other, but they did sleep together at least once (apparently). If you search for “Yeats and Gonne” you’ll get many many lengthy discussions of the ins and outs of their long, long mutual dance.
But this exchange in particular caught my eye:
When Yeats told Gonne he wasn’t happy without her, she replied:
“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.”
I imagine that only made him want to marry her more.
And yet, indeed, the mostly-unfulfilled and yet extremely intense relationship was the wellspring from which a great deal of Yeats’ poetry came. Love that cannot be doesn’t cause people to be poets, much less great poets. But for someone who’s already a great poet, it certainly furnishes a lot of deep material.
Indeed, creativity flourishes best when operating within constraints. It was watching Robin Williams that led to this insight, he was most brilliant when working under a constraint such as a movie script, left on stage with only his imagination as limit, he’d invariably start bouncing off the walls spiraling into chaotic, unrelated ramblings.
Not a particularly fervent champion of the environment or of wildlife.
But, you might note that Goone had what appears to be a dead bird that makes up part of her hat, and it probably was.
The 19th and early 20th century fad of having bird feathers or whole birds as part of women’s hats resulted in the slaughter of an enormous number of birds–almost driving some particular species of birds to extinction–before this practice was outlawed by the Migratory Bird Act of 1918 which–credit where credit is due–was reportedly spearheaded by two women.
I consider Yeats one of the Greats. But I didn’t know about Maude until about 5 minutes ago, reading Neo’s posting. And suddenly I saw his poem “Among School Children” as a reflection of his experience of her.
Of course the last four lines are a great poetic statement of a profoundly important philosophical principle about the real world. They are easily a whole poem all by themselves.
. . .
William Butler Yeats
Among School Children
I
I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;
A kind old nun in a white hood replies;
The children learn to cipher and to sing,
To study reading-books and histories,
To cut and sew, be neat in everything
In the best modern way – the children’s eyes
In momentary wonder stare upon
A sixty-year-old smiling public man.
II
I dream of a Ledaean body, bent
Above a sinking fire. a tale that she
Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event
That changed some childish day to tragedy –
Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent
Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,
Or else, to alter Plato’s parable,
Into the yolk and white of the one shell.
III
And thinking of that fit of grief or rage
I look upon one child or t’other there
And wonder if she stood so at that age –
For even daughters of the swan can share
Something of every paddler’s heritage –
And had that colour upon cheek or hair,
And thereupon my heart is driven wild:
She stands before me as a living child.
IV
Her present image floats into the mind –
Did Quattrocento finger fashion it
Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind
And took a mess of shadows for its meat?
And I though never of Ledaean kind
Had pretty plumage once – enough of that,
Better to smile on all that smile, and show
There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.
V
What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap
Honey of generation had betrayed,
And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape
As recollection or the drug decide,
Would think her Son, did she but see that shape
With sixty or more winters on its head,
A compensation for the pang of his birth,
Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?
VI
Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Solider Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
What a star sang and careless Muses heard:
Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.
VII
Both nuns and mothers worship images,
But those the candles light are not as those
That animate a mother’s reveries,
But keep a marble or a bronze repose.
And yet they too break hearts – O Presences
That passion, piety or affection knows,
And that all heavenly glory symbolise –
O self-born mockers of man’s enterprise;
VIII
Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
Neo, I’ve just read your posting from 2013. Aside from the fact he was a heckuva good-looking guy throughout his life, I was pleased to see that you noted “Among School Children” and “Sailing to Byzantium,” which is one of my top-favorite poems.
The first of Yeats’s poems that I ever read — I was a teenager — and in love with which I immediately fell *g* and which still thrills me for its surrealistic quality, is “The Second Coming.” I think I am not alone in that.
Being a great poet was clearly no inoculation against Cuckery of the first order.
What a frightful shit-stirring, havoc-spreading, irresponsible succubus. And those were her good points. Had she possessed male plumbing, she would have been put up against a wall during the Civil War and rightly so.
And now for something completely different. Look up Oudtshoorn and the first and second Ostrich Booms.
The 19th and early 20th century fad of having bird feathers or whole birds as part of women’s hats resulted in the slaughter of an enormous number of birds<
When I was in college there was a terrific movie about the slaughter of birds. It was called “Wind Across the Everglades ” and had Burl Ives in a terrific role. Sort of like his role in”The Big Country” as the patriarch.
I should add it is pretty racist, as I recall, and I saw it in a theater with few whites.
Pretty sure this Yeats poem is about Maud Gonne: No Second Troy
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49772/no-second-troy
Well spotted!
Poor fellow would have been better off with Norah Barnacle.
If she was a true member of the occult and had access to adepts or was herself an adept, she would have known well in advance what Western astrology said her and his incompatibilities were.
A soul mate in occult knowledge is not a lover, but some kind of companion or teammate in life.
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
Ymarsakar:
Whatever you’re smoking, can I try some?
FWIW, Yeats and Aleister Crowley (May he burn in Hell!) really really did not get along with each other at all.
BTW, all three belonged to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Nutters one and all.
It is the women who cause the most poetry who care the least for it, in my experience.
Aleister Crowley (May he burn in Hell!)
What does he have to do with what you are smoking zek?
BTW, all three belonged to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Nutters one and all.
Says the person that wants people to burn in hell for eternal torment. Even I hesitate to wish eternal torment upon my worst enemies that I know of. People who think they are “saved” and thus have the authority to look down on the “damned” is pretty interesting if I may say so myself. It’s nuts basically.
Also, I wonder why many of those who are against Crowley, who they had never met, would be pro NASA and not care about how NASA or JPL uses their budget.
If Crowley was so bad, why do people ignore Parsons of JPL founding fame?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Parsons_(rocket_engineer)
If Crowley is burning in hell, what about all those christians and non christians backing NASA and JPL? They got a Salvation kickstarted deal and kickback from the Jesus guy right. That’s some nice insider trading and privileges.
Zek:
You have unleashed our Kraken! I wouldn’t wish any of my “enemies” to smoke whatever it is Y is toking. Hard to meet a dead man, Crowley, by the way. 😉
Maud Gonne and Maude Bodkins: Two great names in English literature