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| Maude Gonne as imagined by Yeats |
Some people get longer footnotes than they otherwise would have gotten thanks to their association with some much more famous person. Such a one is Maud Gonne who was born on this day in 1866. Maud Gonne did a little acting, but her real job was agitating for Irish independence from Britain. Everyone knows her though, as the woman who turned down the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats. Over and over and over again.
Maud Gonne was born in Surrey, England. Her father was an officer in the British army. Her mother died when she was a child and her father sent her to France to be educated. At the age of 15, she moved to Dublin when her father was posted there. While travelling around the country she witnessed the plight of the Irish peasants who were being dispossessed of their land, and developed a life-long passion for Irish independence.
She first met Yeats when she was 22. He immediately fell in love with her. She meanwhile had fallen in love with a French politician who shared her passion for the Irish. They had a son together who died at the age of one. Maud built a mausoleum for the child with her inheritance and became involved in the occult in hopes of contacting her child.
Two years later she met up with her French lover at their son's mausoleum near Paris. He was now married but that did not stop him from having sex with Maud in the mausoleum. The idea was for their little boy's soul to enter the body of the new child. Maud did indeed get pregnant, but the child was a girl. The girl was named Iseult and was quickly sent off to France to be educated. When Iseult eventually joined her mother in Ireland, Maud referred to her as her niece or cousin, never her daughter.
During these years, Maud formed women's organizations and traveled around England and the U.S. speaking on behalf of a free Ireland. Over the years Yeats proposed to her and was refused four times. He eventually gave up and when he was in his fifties he proposed to the daughter Iseult who was 22. She actually considered it, but said no. "It would upset mother too much," she said.
Maud had told Yeats earlier that he was better off without her (Maud). "...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."
We should not feels too sorry for Yeats. The same year Iseult turned him down, he proposed to a 25 year old Englishwoman and was accepted. The marriage was a happy one and the couple had a daughter and a son. Yeats thought a lot about old age:
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
from Sailing to Byzantium
Or, from the perspective of those featured in yesterday's post:
ReplyDeleteAn old wolf is but a toothy thing,
A scruffy mange upon thinned bones, lest
Animus howl, throat voiced, wheezing sing
For scruffy pack elders, mortals behest,
Such howl carries the note the last did sing
Monument against the worlding silence
Such ways have we roamed the prairies and bay
Back to the holy city of Wannaskay.
Wannaska has been blessed by the poets Stenzel, Stenzel & McDonnell, and their one year anniversary compilation of the Wannaskan Almanac, aided, in part, by three capable writers to sort of round out the offering lest a few readers stumble across words that rhyme and words that don't and wonder why to even try and make sense of them, but know deep in their dark hearts that poetry is an art form that only the truly gifted can employ and they must accept that fact or perish in the thought.
ReplyDeleteMr. WW, you have touched my poet's heart, and by association the hearts of the other poets, Stenzel, and McDonnell. But I really shouldn't speak for others. Back to me -- your comment is very like a poem, itself. (Poems don't have to rhyme or even have line breaks; just ask Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a favorite beat poet of mine. Here's one of his creations:
ReplyDeleteI have a 100 watt Harmony House light bulb glowing in my toilet. I believe it is growing fond of me.
As far as "try and make sense of them," do you mean the poems or the poets? Either oro both warrant attention; the first for being crazy enough to write what few people read (gratitude going out to those who honor us by doing so), and regarding the poems themselves, this art form, like much painting, sculpture, even music, is not so much to be understood, as felt in the bones - not intellectual bones, but the earth-born bones that give us life. "Singing the Bones Alive Again," that sort of thing. (Title of a poem I wrote a long time ago.)
I almost gasped when I read your last words, starting with, ". . . but know deep in their dark hearts . . . or perish in the thought." This is an authentic insight into the poet's heart. We poets are capable of almost any tone or emotion; some of us do tend toward writing from our "dark hearts." I did that for many months at the beginning of our Almanac adventure. Then a fellow writer told me to lighten up. Methought, maybe there's a point here, so I did lighten up. Hmmm . . . okay, but not nearly as true as reality. So you can imagine how grateful I am for your implicit permission to write from that "dark heart," the lens through which I see the way things actually are. Hubris? Yes, but who's to say whether the dark heart tells the truth or not?
You mention our upcoming anniversary. Do you happen to know the date of the very first post? Being the Luddite that I am, I can't figure it out from the blog. My first post was some time in mid-February, but I'm sure there were posts before my first one. At any rate, should we not pinpoint that important date, and get together (including spouses) for a beverage of choice, some repartee, and a few witticism? Seems a shame to let such an important date pass without giving ourselves an "atta boy" or "atta girl," as the case may be. What say you all?
Mr. Chairman: so nice to see another Yeats poem. Dare we say that we inspire each other in our poetic pursuits. Byzantium is worthy of a poem - actually many. Having walked in this city (now Istanbul), I can say that its antiquity almost brings one to one's knees at the sheer ages that have passed from its first settlement. That said, I offer the following as praise for this post:
ReplyDeleteA young woman is all made of ancient stock
All spirals of flowers upon a stem
Her hands raise up, her throat opens with song
Her tattered dress speaks of all elder things
She is not schooled but louder sings those
Melodies of monuments and gloried bones
We all sail the wild seas of words and tongue
To the holy village of Wannaskium