| Maud Gonne was the woman who inspired William Butler Yeats to write many of his poems and plays. Maud Gonne, born in Aldershot, England (1865). She was the daughter of an Irish army officer, and she became an Irish nationalist and revolutionary who helped stir up opposition to British rule in Ireland. She was one of the most beautiful women of her time, and Yeats fell in love with her the first time he saw her. He said, "[When I met her] the troubles of my life began." He described her as "Tall and noble but with face and bosom / Delicate in colour as apple blossom." He proposed marriage soon after their first meeting, and she refused. But they both believed in magic and the occult, and in their letters they referred to their mystical marriage, and their telepathic communication. Gonne later told Yeats that she couldn't marry him because she believed they had been brother and sister in a previous life. Yeats spent most of his life pining for her while she traveled around Europe, breaking other men's hearts as she made the case for Irish liberation. After she refused Yeats's second marriage proposal, he wrote that he might as well have offered his love to a statue in a museum. When she married an Irish solider, he was devastated. He described the day he heard the news as, "the day / When, the ears being deafened, the sight of the eyes blind / With lightning, you went from me." After her husband died in an armed uprising, Yeats proposed marriage again, and Gonne again refused. So he proposed to her daughter, and she refused him, too. He finally gave up and decided that he disagreed with many of Gonne's political positions. But his love for her inspired some of the most beautiful love poems in the English language, including "When You Are Old" (1892). When you are old and gray and full of sleep, And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look You eyes had once, and of their shadows deep; How many loved your moments of glad grace, 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. ~Writer's Almanac |
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