Tom McCarthy marks today's 150th anniversary of the birth of poet William Butler Yeats
“...all the
while I know that she made me and I her...” (diary 1909-1910)
Who, then was Maud Gonne, “the
beautiful Irish nationalist” about whom Yeats
wrote “ some of the most original
and poignant love poems of all time”? (Robert Mighall). For our modern age, she would be regarded as
unusual; for her own time (1866-1953) she was extraordinary.
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| William Butler Yeats |
“I was twenty-three years old when the troubling of my
life began”: this is how Yeats begins
his description of Maud Gonne on first meeting her in 1889. His Autobiography continues:
“I had never thought to see
in a living woman so great beauty. It
belonged to famous
pictures,
to poetry, to some legendary past. A
complexion like the blossom of apples,
and yet face and body had the
beauty of lineaments which Blake calls the highest
beauty...she
seemed of a divine race”.
What did she see in this young Irish writer whose first
poems had been first published in 1885?
Kathleen Tynan, his friend and a poet herself, said that he was
“beautiful to look at, with his dark face, its touch of vivid colouring, the
night-black hair, the eager dark eyes”.
She became for Yeats his inspiration, the great love and yet
the troubling of all his life.
The Hill of Howth or Howth Head guards Dublin Bay from
the north. It was a place of special
importance to Maud Gonne where she lived as a child. Later in life she wrote:
“No
place has ever seemed to me quite as lovely as Howth was then. ... The heather
grew
so high and strong that we could make cubby houses and be entirely hidden and
entirely
warm and sheltered from the high wind”.
Yeats, too, loved Howth where he lived for a short time
when he was young. In 1890 he spent a
day there with Maud Gonne and remembering that day he wrote his first poem
about her. It is an early Yeats when he
was still under the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites and it has all the lazy
beauty of Pre-Raphaelite rhythms. Of this period of his life he later
wrote: “We were the last Romantics”. The
poem is called “The White Birds”:
“I
would that we were, my beloved, white birds on the foam of the sea!
We
tire of the flame of the meteor, before it can fade and flee;
And
the flame of the blue star of twilight, hung low on the rim of the sky,
Has
awaked in our hearts, my beloved, a sadness that may not die.
A
weariness comes from those dreamers, dew-dabbled, the lily and rose;
Ah
dream not of them, my beloved, the flame of the meteor that goes,
Or the
flame of the blue star that lingers hung low in the fall of the dew:
For
I would we were changed to white birds on the wandering foam: I and you!
I am
haunted by numberless islands, and many a Danaan shore,
Where
Time would surely forget us, and Sorrow comes near us no more;
Soon
far from the rose and the lily and fret of the flames would we be,
Were
we only white birds, my beloved, buoyed up on the foam of the sea!
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| Maud Gonne |
Maud Gonne and Ireland, hurling “the little streets
upon the great”
In her early years she moved with her family between
England, Ireland and occasionally France. At the age of 18, she was presented
at Court and was escorted onto the royal
dais by the Prince of Wales. At the age of 21, after the death of her
father, she began living an independent life in Paris where she became involved
with a right-wing group intent on destroying the Third Republic; among that
group she met Lucien Millevoye, a journalist/politician. On the group’s behalf she
travelled to Russia on a secret mission to persuade the Tsar to finance a
right-wing plot against the Third Republic;
in 1890, she returned to Ireland and met the great leader of the Irish
Republican Brotherhood, John O’Leary, who had been exiled from Ireland for
fifteen years for his part in the Fenian Rising of 1865 ( see Yeats’s “September, 1913”). O’Leary converted her to Irish nationalism,
just as earlier he had converted Yeats who remained always moderate.
Her first Irish campaign in 1890 was against the mass
eviction of tenants in the most poverty-stricken areas of Donegal; Yeats’s poem
“Her Praise”, more than twenty years later.
remembers this:
“I
will talk no more of books or the long war
But
walk by the dry thorn until I have found
Some
beggar sheltering from the wind, and there
Manage
the talk until her name comes round.
If
there be rags enough he will know her name
And
be well pleased remembering it, for in the old days,
Though
she had young men’s praise and old men’s blame,
Among
the poor both old and young gave her praise”.
In Donegal, a warrant was issued
for her arrest but later cancelled.
In Paris, she founded a newspaper called L’Irlande Libre. On a fund-raising tour of America in support
of Home Rule for Ireland, a newspaper called her “Ireland’s Joan of Arc”. She was one of the leaders of two massive
demonstrations in Dublin, first against the celebrations of Queen Victoria’s
Jubilee in 1897 and a few years later against the visit to Ireland of King
Edward VII, her former escort. On that occasion, she hung a black petticoat
outside her house in Dublin in a street festooned with Union Jacks. When a
Unionist mob invaded her house, she fought back. In “No Second Troy” Yeats
tells us:
“Why
should I blame her that she filled my days
With
misery, or that she would of late
Have
taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or
hurled the little streets upon the great,
During the Boer War she spoke out in Paris in favour of
the Boers against “British Imperialism”;
here she met Captain John MacBride, an Irish nationalist who fought with the
Boers in South Africa. In Dublin a pro-Boer march was banned but Gonne and a
few other Irish leaders ignored the ban. Around that time she became the first
president of Inghinidhe na hEireann, (Daughters of Ireland), a group of women
dedicated to promote Irish culture and Home Rule for Ireland. She was one of the leaders in a campaign to
extend free school meals for Irish schoolchildren, a campaign that succeeded in
1912.
In late 1914, Maud Gonne began working as a Red Cross
nurse in a French military hospital where she became aware for the first time
of the reality of war:
“...in my heart is growing up a wild hatred
of the war machine”.
The Easter Rising
in Dublin in 1916 began and failed with the executions of all but two of its
leaders (see “Sixteen Dead Men”). Stranded in France, she was desperate to go
to Ireland, but as soon as she arrived in London she was served with a notice
under the Defence of the Realm Act, exiling her from Ireland. Nevertheless, eventually she travelled to Dublin in disguise; she was
arrested in 1918 and sent to Holloway
Prison where her companions included Constance Markiewicz, (nee Gore-Booth),
one of the two reprieved leaders of the Easter Rising, and Kathleen Clarke, the
widow of one of the executed men, Tom Clarke. This is how Yeats remembers
Constance in his “In Memory of Eva
Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz”:
“The
light of evening, Lissadell,
Great
windows open to the south,
Two
girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful,
one a gazelle
A later poem “On a Political Prisoner” is more sombre.
In 1921, the
Anglo-Irish Treaty divided Ireland into North and South. A government which accepted the Treaty’s
division of Ireland was formed; tragically a bitter and shameful civil war
began between former nationalist fighters, between those in favour of the
Treaty and those against ( see “Meditations in Time of Civil War”). A group of
women in Dublin, including Maud Gonne, set up a Peace Committee to reconcile
the two sides, but the Government was pitiless in its violence against former
comrades. With her Peace Committee she
led huge and noisy demonstrations against the Irish Government that was
imprisoning and executing anti-Treaty campaigners. She wrote in her Memoirs:
“We
claimed, as women, on whom the misery of civil war would fall, that we had a
right to
Be
heard”.
Her home was ransacked by a pro-Treaty crowd...as it had
been under British rule years earlier. She was arrested twice by the new Irish
Government and on the second occasion she was released after going on hunger
strike. She went to Northern Ireland to
see for herself the distressed conditions of Catholics driven from their
homes: she was arrested and deported
back to Dublin. With her Peace Committee
a Women’s Prisoners’ Defence League was set up to support the families’ of
imprisoned anti-Treaty men and women. It was eventually banned by the Irish
Government but continued to meet and campaign under a different name. She spent the rest of her life as a fervent
campaigner for refugees and for prisoners’ rights.
Maud Gonne; Millevoye; MacBride; Yeats: “Love fled...and his his head among a
crowd of stars”
The most astonishing fact about this “beautiful Irish
nationalist” was that she was English, born in Tongham in Surrey in 1866. Her father, Tommy, was an English army
captain and later colonel, sent to Ireland with his wife and two daughters when
she was two years old. Yet she was a very
private person and her own private life had its deal of troubles and its secrets.
After the death of her father, it was John O’Leary,
almost a father-figure, who converted her to Home Rule for Ireland. She moved
equally between Dublin and Paris, having ample means to lead an independent
life. In Paris in 1887, she began a ten-year relationship with a married
right-wing French politician, Lucien Millevoye; it was on his behalf that she
went on that secret mission to Russia.
By the time she met Yeats in 1889, she already had a son named George
who had died when he was one. By the
time Yeats had proposed to her twice, she had a daughter named Iseult whom she
passed off as her niece. No one, least of all Yeats, in Ireland knew any of
this.
Yeats and Gonne were opposites in many ways. A contemporary wrote of Yeats that “He
wanders in the realms of the mind”; Gonne says of her life at the time she met
Yeats: “...it was one of ceaseless activity and travelling. I rarely spent a month in one place”. Over a
period of twelve years he proposed to her on five different occasions. In her Memoirs
she recalls that on one occasion she told him:
“You make beautiful poetry out of what you
call your unhappiness and you are happy
in that...Poets should never marry. The world should thank me for not marrying
you”.
Yeats’s poem “Words” recalls this unwelcome advice:
“That
had she done so, who can say
What
would have been shaken from the sieve?
I
might have thrown poor words away
And
been content to live”.
In November 1898 in Dublin she finally confessed to Yeats
the details of her relationship with Millevoye; he wrote no poems for a year.
In Paris Maud Gonne was active in pro-Boer propaganda.
There she had met and admired John MacBride in 1900, an Irish hero to Irish
nationalists because he fought against the British forces in the Boer War. In
1903, she converted to Catholicism and suddenly and unexpectedly married
MacBride in Paris in February, she so unconventional, he as an Irish man of his
time, so full of conventions about a woman’s place, always second. It was she,
not the best man, who gave the final toast at their wedding reception; she insisted on keeping her own name, too.
A few days later in Dublin, as he was about to give an
evening lecture on the future of Irish drama, Yeats received a telegram,
informing him of her marriage. Afterwards he remembered nothing of the lecture
as he walked alone the streets of Dublin, devastated by what he saw as
betrayal. “Reconciliation”, written in
1908, recalls that night:
“Some
may have blamed you that you took away
The
verses that could move them on the day
When,
the ears being deafened, the sight of the eyes blind
With
lightning, you went from me, and I could find
Nothing
to make a song about but kings,
Helmets,
and swords, and half-forgotten things
That
were like memories of you – but now
We’ll
out, for the world lives as long ago;
And
while we’re in our laughing, weeping fit,
Hurl
helmets, crowns, and swords into the pit.
But,
dear, cling close to me; since you were gone,
My
barren thoughts have chilled me to the bone
Her sudden decision to marry MacBride was followed a year
later after the birth of their son, Sean, by a decision to divorce him, citing
drunkenness and cruelty. For Catholics
divorce was not possible, so in the end there was a judicial separation in
1906. The Irish nationalists now turned
against her, blaming her. O’Leary, her mentor and the godfather of her son,
took MacBride’s part. Lady Gregory, Yeats’s partner in setting up the Abbey
Theatre, wrote that “I think that her work in Ireland is over for her”.
Yeats was the only person who stood by her. He wrote to Lady Gregory that “The trouble
with these men (Irish nationalists) is that in their eyes a woman has no
rights”. On her return to Dublin after
the separation, she went to the Abbey Theatre, escorted by Yeats for a
performance of Lady Gregory’s “The Gaol
Gate”. This great campaigner for Irish independence was hissed at by this
Irish audience. She turned, smiling, to face her attackers; Yeats was enraged,
(see the words of “my phoenix” in his poem “The People”:
“The
drunkards, pilferers of public funds,
All
the dishonest crowd I had driven away,
When
my luck changed and they dared meet my face,
Crawled
from obscurity, and set upon me
Those
I had served and some that I had fed;
Yet
never have I, now nor any time,
Complained
of the people.”
For ten years Maud Gonne was cold-shouldered by the
nationalists, yet she continued working on Irish causes.
Yeats proposed again for the sixth time; she offered him
a “spiritual marriage” which he accepted but privately was utterly frustrated,
(see his bitter poem “Presences”). The
final stanza of “Adam’s Curse”, which he had written much earlier, now seemed
prescient:
“I
had a thought for no one’s but your ears:
That
you were beautiful, and that I strove
To
love you in the old high ways of love;
That
it had all seemed happy, and yet we’d grown
As
weary-hearted as that hollow moon”.
The culmination of centuries of struggle for Irish
independence took place in the Easter Rising of 1916. Within a week the
rebellion was crushed and its leaders executed, John MacBride among them. “Easter 1916” is Yeats’s response. Maud Gonne returned to Ireland as soon as she
could as Maud Gonne MacBride, thus joining that highly respected group, that of
the nationalist widows of that 1916 and she was accepted once again.
In 1917 Yeats at the age of 51 married Georgie Hyde-Lees
in London. Gonne MacBride was quite happy at this. Indeed while she was in prison in Holloway
she offered her Dublin home to the married couple. They had two children, a
daughter, Anne, and a son, Michael.
Last Years:
“There is grey in your hair”
Once Ireland won its independence in 1921, her friendship
with Yeats cooled over political differences. She was opposed to the pro-Treaty
Irish Government and he served as a Senator from 1922-1928. He himself, as a Protestant, had always been
opposed to her Catholicism. When he
resigned from the Senate, they resumed their friendship, though never as
ardently as before.
She is never named in all the poems about her, however in
“Beautiful Lofty Things”, written in 1937, two years before he died – not
a love poem – Yeats names her among all
the people and experiences that made life meaningful for him and that made him:
“Beautiful
lofty things, O’Leary’s noble head,
My
father upon the Abbey stage, before him a raging crowd:
‘The
land of Saints’, and then as the applause died out,
‘Of
plaster Saints’; his beautiful, mischievous head thrown back.
Standish
O’Grady supporting himself between the tables
Speaking
to a drunken audience high nonsensical words;
Augusta
Gregory seated at her great ormolu table,
Her
eightieth winter approaching: ‘Yesterday he threatened my life.
I
told him that nightly from six to seven I sat at this table,
The
blinds drawn up’; Maud Gonne at Howth
station waiting a train,
Pallas
Athene in that straight back and arrogant head:
All
the Olympians; a thing never known again”.
So there she is, at the end of his life, as she was at
the beginning. In pride of place at the
end of his own Panathenaea, Maud Gonne, “of divine race”, Pallas Athena
herself, the last of the Olympians.
Bibliography:
YEATS by Richard Ellmann; W.B. YEATS by Alasdair Macrae; A PREFACE TO YEATS by Edward Malins and John
Purkiss; COLLECTED POEMS OF W.B. YEATS
by Robert Mighall; MAUD GONNE by
Margaret Ward.
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