We’ll hear a lot in this decade of centenaries about patriots who died for Ireland. But spare a thought for poor Maud Gonne who, despite living to old age, made a different, and near-ultimate, sacrifice.
In refusing all the advances of WB Yeats, including four marriage proposals, she knowingly allowed him to place her on a pedestal, where she would be gawked at by future generations. And she must have guessed that images of her beauty, as preserved for posterity by mere photographs, would never stand comparison with the love-lorn exaggerations of one of the world’s greatest poets.
Whereas even a short-lived affair might have shut him up. It would doubtless have ended badly. Then Yeats’s early love poems would have been counterbalanced by the literary equivalent of the divorce album, and the pressure would have been off Maud in every way thereafter.
Instead, knowing well that it would only encourage further effusions about her perfection, she turned him down repeatedly, over decades, in the interests of the greater good. Here she is in 1914 – almost a quarter century into the siege — explaining yet again why she won’t marry him, while insisting he’s happier single:
“Oh yes you are, because you make beautiful poetry out of what you call your unhappiness and you are happy in that. Marriage would be such a dull affair. Poets should never marry. The world should thank me for not marrying you.”
And with that, Yeats is off again to build her a new, even higher pedestal in verse. Nor was it just in poetry – a medium where the usual rules of sanity are suspended – that he eulogised her.
Here he is [from 1913] recalling their first meeting, in apparently sober prose:
“I had never thought to see in a living woman [such] great beauty. It belonged to famous pictures, to poetry, to some legendary past. A complexion like the blossom of apples, and yet the face and body had the beauty of lineaments, which Blake calls the highest beauty because it changes least from youth to age, and a stature so great that she seemed of divine race.”
It can’t just be me, vulgarian that I am, who reads such descriptions of Gonne and then looks at her photographs before concluding, mystified, that you had to be there. She certainly had striking features. But even allowing a 20 per cent discount on the apple blossoms, which black and white photographs could hardly capture, the best I can allow is that she was handsome.
One might be tempted to attribute some of Yeats’s ardour to the fact that, great poet aside, he was also a world-class eccentric. And yet he wasn’t unusual in worshipping Gonne. A sister of the poet, Lolly Yeats, wrote of an early visit to their house and the already-famous beauty “who is marching on to glory over the hearts of the Dublin youths”.
With the clinical eye of a fellow female, she described Maud as “tall and very stylish and well dressed in a careless way”. But another contemporary, Mary Colum, sounded almost as smitten as the male Yeats. Gonne’s beauty was “startling in its greatness, its dignity, its strangeness,” she wrote, and “people’s hearts stopped beating” when they saw her.
That and all the other quotations above are taken from a charming new book on the subject, which attempts to explain Gonne’s fatal attraction, albeit more with comic intent than as an exercise in literary analysis.
Yeats in Love is by the Sligo artist and illustrator Annie West and it traces the whole tortured affair through a series of climactic events, including the various proposals, from the 1880s to the poet's old age.
Its opulent, full-colour drawings don’t attempt to capture Maud’s apple-blossoms, never mind her Blakean lineaments. But the wit of the pictures is accompanied by well-chosen words, including some of the poems to which Yeats was driven on his regular rebounds. And West’s gentle style sits well with the subject: she treads softly, treading on dreams.
Mind you, in a preface for the book, Theo Dorgan advances the possibility that the poet, at least in later years, was not as far gone about Maud as it suited him to pretend, even to himself. Dorgan’s suspicion is that there was mutual role-playing and that “the old boy was putting it on a bit”. I suspect he’s right. If so, even the poet might have enjoyed West’s affectionate joke, which is at least as handsome as Maud was, and is available (at €34.99) from good bookshops and anniewest.com. @FrankmcnallyIT