A Love Song

W.B. Yeats

One of the great unrequited (almost) love stories in literature is of the poet William Butler Yeats and Maud Gonne McBride. In 1889, Yeats met Maud Gonne, then a 23-year-old heiress and ardent Nationalist. Gonne was eighteen months younger than Yeats and later claimed she met the poet as a "paint-stained art student." Gonne had admired "The Isle of Statues" and sought out his acquaintance. Yeats developed an obsessive infatuation with her beauty and outspoken manner, and she was to have a significant and lasting effect on his poetry and his life thereafter. She eventually rejected him and married Major John McBride a hero (to the Boers) of the Boer War and who was executed in 1916 for his part in the Easter Rising against English Rule in Dublin.

Their son, Seán McBride, who grew up in France and retained a French accent to the end of his life was variously IRA Chief of Staff, Foreign Minister of Ireland, Founder Member of the Council of Europe, Founder member of Amnesty International, Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations and at the time of his death the only holder of both the Nobel and Lenin Peace Prizes. An even rarer achievement was that his Special Branch file was opened before he was born!

The joke about Yeats and Maud Gonne (best recited in an Irish accent) was that " the poor fellow has gone maadd over Maud Gonne!"

A Drinking Song

WINE comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That’s all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939).

Responsibilities and Other Poems. 1916.

See also;

Where Yeats died and was originally buried;

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2008/09/e-1027-roquebrune-cap-martin.html

Where he was inspired and nurtured;

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2009/09/coole-park-galway.html


Maud Gonne