Maud Gonne's relatives remembered Ireland's most famous muse in Sligo yesterday, writes Marese McDonagh
‘POOR WILLIE.” In the Methodist church on Sligo’s Wine Street yesterday, a family member recalled that this was how Maud Gonne and her daughter Iseult referred to William Butler Yeats, the man considered by many to be the greatest poet in the English language.
One could only feel a tinge of sympathy for Yeats who, remembering the first time he saw Maud Gonne when she arrived at the family home in Bedford Park, London, wrote: “The troubling of my life began.”
Speaking to students at the Yeats International Summer School, German-born sculptor Imogen Stuart was careful to stress how important “poor Willie” had been to the lives of Iseult (her mother-in-law) and the woman she and everyone else called “Madam”. “There is a lot of nonsense being talked about how he wanted to marry Iseult,” said Stuart. “The main thing is, he was a wonderful friend to her and to Madam.”
Gonne was in her eighties when Stuart, the young sculptor who would marry her grandson Ian (son of Iseult and the writer Francis Stuart), arrived in Ireland in 1949. Sixty years later, Irish people still ask, “how do you like it over here?” she joked, while apologising for her accent.
Stella Mew, chief executive of the Yeats Society, explained that, more than 70 years after his death, living links with the poet are hard to find. In what she described as “wonderful serendipity” she became Stuart’s neighbour a few years ago and was astounded when her new friend showed her a family photo album featuring familiar images of WB Yeats’s muse.
Intriguingly, as well as photographs of the young Maud Gonne and her daughter Iseult, there were photos of Gonne as the old woman Yeats must have imagined in the love poem, When You are Old and Grey.
When Stuart arrived in Ireland, her new family was living at Laragh Castle in Co Wicklow, a former British army barracks where they grew vegetables in what had been a shooting range and kept their Rhode Island Red hens in the prisoners’ yard.
Gonne, who lived in Dublin, had bought the property for her daughter – and what Stuart appears to remember most was the biting cold in the building.
“I was made very welcome from the first moment,” Stuart told her rapt audience. She and her future husband struggled to make a living, which they managed mainly thanks to commissions from the Catholic Church. “There were no such thing in those days as commissions from the banks or schools or public places.”
Initially, she saw Ireland as the land of saints and scholars. “Very few people knew of the dark side of Ireland then. I certainly did not,” she said.
Gonne, a striking woman at almost six feet tall, was the centre of family life in Roebuck House Clonskeagh, where her son Sean McBride lived. His wife regularly entertained the extended family and Gonne always took pride of place at the head of the table.
“She had a very English accent, although I don’t think she would have liked to be told that,” said Stuart. “She was very elegant, always beautifully dressed, in a very individual way – and because she was so tall, she moved differently.”
But, in her eighties, Maud Gonne “took to the bed” and, according to Stuart, those who came to pay homage did so in her bedroom in Clonskeagh. “I remember my daughter, as a tiny little girl, crawling all over the bed. It was a lovely bright room upstairs. There were lots of books and she was always happy and delighted to see the children.”
As Gonne’s English accent rang through the church yesterday, courtesy of an old Claddagh recording of a Radio Éireann interview, her great-great-great-grandchildren sat in the front row playing with their dolls. Fascinated onlookers searching for family resemblances swore the little girls were the image of Yeats’s Cathleen Ní Houlihan.
In the interview, conducted towards the end of her life, Gonne described seeing people turned out of their homes in the Irish countryside – and of babies born in ditches. Declaring her belief in people using force to assert their rights she said: “Talk is good in its place, but if not backed up by force it cuts no ice.”
One wonders what poor Willie made of it all.
