Love and conflict

In 1908, William Butler Yeats finally got what he had sought for so long, and it was not what he had hoped. Since the day in 1889 that the hansom cab bearing Maud Gonne – former débutante, dislocated aristocrat and passionate Irish nationalist – drew up outside the bohemian Yeats family home in Bedford Park, London, the young poet had been besotted. Nurtured on Shelley and the Pre-Raphaelites, his young dreams had been of remote, tragically beautiful women, powerful, independent and yet vulnerable, and now that dream had arrived at his front door. For the next twenty years her image would hypnotise his love poetry and, with it, his imagination of what an Ireland free from British rule would look like. Believing that ‘there is no fine nationality without literature, and…there is no fine literature without nationality’, their joint cause was to found an Ireland that had thrown off the divisive, materialistic culture of the British and discovered a national unity through recreating ‘the ancient arts…as they were understood when they moved a whole people and not a few people who had grown up in a leisured class’. While she drew his politics towards her unflinching republicanism, he in turn introduced her to his occult and mystical societies, bent on discovering in the supernatural tales of the Irish peasantry ancient truths which would create a symbolic order adequate to the coming nation. But to Yeats's despair, political and mystical collaboration did not make her love him, and his Celtic Twilight poetry of these years would have to mix its solemn, ritualised search for the ‘red-rose-bordered hem’ of ancient Eire's dress with a disappointment that he had not yet been fit to touch Gonne's. Over the years, their intense ‘spiritual friendship’ pitched the poet between a desperate hope and successive disenchantments, as he came to learn of her lovers and children, to see her married, and particularly after the Jubilee Riots of 1897, to fear her enthusiasm for violent revolutionary crowds. But despite his growing dislike of populist nationalism, her image would always electrify him, and several other affairs foundered because of it.