Poetry Sunday 1 June 2014

Posted on by

With comments from Ira Maine, Poetry Editor

THE ROSE OF THE WORLD

by: William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

WHO dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?
For these red lips, with all their mournful pride,
Mournful that no new wonder may betide,
Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam,
And Usna’s children died.
 
We and the labouring world are passing by:
Amid men’s souls, that waver and give place
Like the pale waters in their wintry race,
Under the passing stars, foam of the sky,
Lives on this lonely face.
 
Bow down, archangels, in your dim abode:
Before you were, or any hearts to beat,
Weary and kind one lingered by His seat;
He made the world to be a grassy road
Before her wandering feet.
Imagine this situation:
Edith Maud Gonne, a future society beauty, is born in 1866 in Farnham in Surrey (England) to Thomas and Edith Frith Gonne.  Thomas Gonne is a captain in the 17th Lancers.

After the death of her mother, Maud is sent to boarding school in France.

In 1882 Maud rejoins her father who has been posted to Dublin. Whilst resident in Ireland Ms Gonne is a first hand witness to the discrimination and ill treatment of the Irish by the British Crown forces.  As a result she becomes a lifelong convert to the cause of Irish Nationalism.  Following the death of her father she moves back to France where she meets Lucien Millevoye, a right wing politician.  This liason eventually produces two children, George (who died young) and Iseult who at 23 would receive a proposal of marriage from the ageing William Butler Yeats, would have an affair with Ezra Pound before eventually, at 26, marrying the Irish/Australian writer, Francis Stuart.

But to get back to Maude Gonne;

Ms Gonne first met Yeats in 1889. Yeats immediately fell in love with her and in the period from 1891 to 1901 proposed marriage on at least four occasions.  All of these offers were refused.

Ms Gonne’s refusals had a purpose; to begin with she was not in love with him.  She had also realized from early on that Yeats was idealizing her, that she represented to him an almost unattainable level of female perfection against which no woman could possibly be measured.  She believed, as she later pointed out to Yeats, her rejection of him and his consequent misery actually served to stimulate his creativity.  Astonishingly this long period of unhappiness does in fact seem to drag Yeat’s poetry out of the Celtic Twilight and into an area where the poet begins to ask uncomfortable questions of himself.  There is a noticeable maturing in his work as the 20th century advances.

In the meantime, and much to Yeat’s chagrin, Maud Gonne returns to France and marries John McBride, a professional Irish soldier, in Paris.  Yeats, in his magnificent poem, ‘Easter 1916’ describes McBride as ‘a vainglorious lout’.  McBride beats her and molests her eight year old daughter, Iseult.  Maud leaves and takes her daughter with her.  McBride returns to Ireland.

A very few years later, at Easter of 1916, McBride, together with a rag-tag of soldiers, teachers, poets and artists, declared war on England by occupying strategic points around Dublin.  Within a few days they were all captured, imprisoned, and executed.
This sacrifice inspired in Yeats the heartbreaking lines;
‘…all’s changed, changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born…’ 
Maud Gonne-McBride appears again and again in Yeat’s poetry, sometimes as Helen of Troy, sometimes as the beautiful Deirdre of the Sorrows, who, as one of the children of Usna, is a tragic figure in Irish mythology, or as Ireland itself in the form of Caitlin Ni Houlihan, a woman who, in common with Helen and Deirdre, is so irresistible that man’s desire for her causes endless tragedy and death.

Rather than take this poem line by line, I believe it sufficient to say that the poem is a refutation of the notion ‘…that beauty passes like a dream…’

As long as Yeat’s poetry gives ears to hear and eyes to see, beauty, and particularly, in this case the beauty of women, ‘the Rose of the World’ is a constant.  Maud Gonne, in Yeats’s view is a naturally recurring ideal and he readily compares her to tragic beauties of the past (Helen, Deirdre etc)
Helen, ‘the face that launched a thousand ships and burned the topless towers of Illium…’ was a woman of such breathtaking beauty that men went to war for her sake.
‘…under the passing star, foam of the sky, 
Lives on this lonely face…’
Throughout time ‘…this lonely face…’ is always with us,and liable to be,( because men covet her) the unwitting cause of envy, jealousy and death. This ‘…lonely face…’ is not itself the cause of tragedy, but it is most certainly the cause of tragedy in others.
And before even the archangels existed, ‘…before you were,or any hearts to beat…’  one (the first Helen, the first Deirdre?)  lingered  ‘…by His seat;…’  reluctant to embark on a journey, ‘…weary..’ of it already, aware that her setting out on the soft, the easy ‘…grassy road…’ will bring such endless tragedy to the history of humankind.
Ira Maine, Poetry Editor