I’m off for Louisiana for a crawfish boil despite my allergy to crawfish. It’s a five hour drive so no POETS Day this week for me; more of a Piss Off Really Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Happy PORETS Day.
Crawfish boils are where I eat chicken fingers and warmed over French fries with all the kids. It’s an annual event and I’ve seen youngster chat turn with the years. Bouncy houses were all the rage once. Nerf guns next. Sports and video games discussion got animated as they grew older. My Birmingham nephew is making the trip with us. He’s fifteen and has a girlfriend. I can’t wait to tell the other kids so we can all tease him.
After we eat I’ll go hang out with the adults again. I can’t wait to tell them about my nephew’s girlfriend so we can all tease him.
For the rest of you, kick off before the boss says it’s time. Catch a ball game if the weather’s nice or pull up a barstool and watch one with something cold and delicious if it’s not. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.
Read a little verse first.
***
Maud Gonne was an actress and activist. That’s all the rage now.
Every starlet with a guest spot on the CW has a cause. Animal rights are a great public ingratiator, especially if you stick with pets. Saving various darters is great, but people want to strike what’s near them from a safe distance. Liking the tweet of a Hollywood pretty person who says she advocates (hate that word used that way) for the ASPCA is how an average American who thinks their jerk neighbor leaves his dog outside too long can feel involved. Cancer advocacy (counter to a strict reading with diseases but still gets used) is big. Emma Watson only wears ecominical clothes. The actors I most admire fight against injustice. Somebody has to.
There are issue advisors and advocacy directors for the indecisive. It’s not enough to be good at pretending to be other people. You have to be down with a cause if you’re going to stand out in today’s Hollywood or basement with a backdrop for your YouTube channel. Everybody’s an activist.
Maud founded Sinn Féin.
Not exactly. She was one of the founders of the National Council along with Arthur Griffith, who introduced his Sinn Féin policy at the council’s first annual convention in 1905. It was a big hit, and the party was born. So, she founded the group that founded Sinn Féin. Once removed but still a player in the incunabular troubles.
Maud gave pro Boer speeches. She organied protests against the Queen’s Jubilee. She spent time promoting for Cumann na mBan, a women’s paramilitary group for the Republican cause. Her husband – albeit a very estranged husband with all manner of foul but unproven accusations thrown about by people other than Gonne and her husband, who wouldn’t have been at the time if the Irish weren’t so very Irish about divorce – was executed for his role in the Easter Rising of 1916. It’s unclear to me if it was her writings, speeches, or actions that were the why, but she’d spend six months in an English prison herself. If the English were up to something, she was against it. What she’s most famous for is not having sex with W.B. Yeats.
In his article “Yeats and Maud Gonne” (Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 3, No 4 (Winter 1962)) Curtis Bradford writes that Yeats referred to his relationship with Gonne as “the troubling of my life.” So, troubles all around.
It’s a good article, worth following the link to read, if a bit long. He recounts the Yeats/Gonne romance, platonic as it was, from its beginning on January 30, 1889, until.
This is one of my favorite of his poems, published in 1902. He was quick to publish, so though there’s no evidence either way, suspicion is that he wrote no earlier than 1901, after twelve years enthralled by Gonne and at least four declined proposals.
The Folly of Being Comforted
(W.B. Yeats 1865-1939)One that is ever kind said yesterday:
‘Your well-beloved’s hair has threads of grey,
And little shadows come about her eyes;
Time can but make it easier to be wise
Though now it seems impossible, and so
All that you need is patience.’
Heart cries, ‘No,
I have not a crumb of comfort, not a grain.
Time can but make her beauty over again:
Because of that great nobleness of hers
The fire that stirs about her, when she stirs,
Burns but more clearly. O she had not these ways
When all the wild Summer was in her gaze.’Heart! O heart! if she’d but turn her head,
You’d know the folly of being comforted.
The breaks in iambic may not even be breaks at all. I prefer to think they are, at least when spoken aloud. “Time can but make” is much better stress/un/un/stress than un/stress/un/stress, though it can be read that way. Same with “Burns but more clearly.” In the broken line, “All that you need” is certainly not meant to hold strictly. “Heart cries, ‘No,” demands a pause and I think a reset. So “I have not a crumb” gets a stress on the “I,” giving my reading six stresses on the line. That’s all quibbling stuff and my feelings won’t be hurt if you think I’m wrong. The music of the whole is exceptional.
According to Wikipedia, Jeffares, A. Norman writes in W. B. Yeats, A New Biography, that when Yeats told Gonne he was “unhappy without her,” she countered,
“Oh yes, you are, because 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.”
For his part, this gleaned from the Crawford article, Yeats saw himself as Lancelot, though chaste, quoting “I have loved a queen beyond measure and exceeding long.” There were breaks. In 1896 he had a tenth month relationship with Diana Vernon, losing his virginity to her at thirty or thirty-one. That same year he also saw Olivia Shakespear, mother of Ezra Pound’s future wife Dorothy.
Gonne herself abhorred sex, claiming, “I have a horror and terror of physical love.” She put her terror aside with others on at least three occasions. In 1890, with French journalist Lucien Millevoye, she had a son, Georges, who died in his first year. The two had a daughter, Iseult, in 1893, conceived in the mausoleum holding the remains of Georges, so as to promote transmigration of his soul to the hopefully conceived. In 1903, she married John MacBride, the husband executed by the British. Their son Sean would go on to found Amnesty International.
Still, Yeats persisted in his love for Maud. When she was unattached, they would spend time together “living as brother and sister.” Her words. They engaged in spiritual marriage, in which they attempted to exist in each other’s dreams. All very odd stuff and sad and frustrating on the Yeats side. He loved her. I can’t say what she held for him, but she didn’t cut him loose. He did write plays specifically for her, and she was lauded for her performances, so it’s tempting to say he was convenient. But she spent years in communion with him. There were deep feelings of a hard to define form.
He rewrote “The Folly of Being Comforted” several times over the years. Mostly, changes were to punctuation and not worth much notice. Below is a version published in 1913. The italics are mine, highlighting what he altered.
One that is ever kind said yesterday:
‘Your well-beloved’s hair has threads of grey,
And little shadows come about her eyes;
‘Time can but make it easier to be wise,
Though now it’s hard, till trouble is at an end;
And so be patient, be wise and patient, friend.’
But, heart, there is no comfort, not a grain;
Time can but make her beauty over again:
Because of that great nobleness of hers
The fire that stirs about her, when she stirs,
Burns but more clearly. O she had not these ways
When all the wild Summer was in her gaze.’Heart! O heart! if she’d but turn her head,
You’d know the folly of being comforted.
There’s weariness setting in. What once seemed impossible is now hard; a challenge become a grind. The call to be patient is itself said in patient, reassuring tones, the heart is addressed instead of observed. “You got this, kiddo.” What was an assessment is encouragement.
Shortly after MacBride was put to death, Yeats proposed again and Gonne refused. Astonishingly, he then proposed to her twenty-one-year-old daughter/possible bearer of her son’s soul, Iseult, who had had a girlhood crush on Yeats and proposed to him herself at age fifteen. Six years older, she turned him down, too.
In 1917 Yeats married Georgie Hyde-Lees, who he met through Olivia Shakespear. He never shook his enamourous feelings for Gonne. He goes back and forth, cursing and worshipping her in poetry and letters.
This is the last, I believe, rewrite of “The Folly of Being Comforted,” published in 1922. Again, italics are mine.
One that is ever kind said yesterday:
‘Your well-beloved’s hair has threads of grey,
And little shadows come about her eyes;
‘Time can but make it easier to be wise
Though now it seem impossible, and so
Patience is all that you have need of.’
No,
I have not a crumb of comfort, not a grain…
Time can but make her beauty over again:
Because of that great nobleness of hers
The fire that stirs about her, when she stirs,
Burns but more clearly. O she had not these ways
When all the wild Summer was in her gaze.’Heart! O heart! if she’d but turn her head,
You’d know the folly of being comforted.
The line break is back, drawing attention and power to the “No.” “Impossible” is back and patience is written of as if vindicated. What’s most striking is that the heart is gone. There is no protest as in the first, no reasoning as in the second. There is no comfort now. That’s stated as fact.
It’s hard to draw generalizations about poets from examining the work of any one. That’s an exceptionally hard task if the one is Yeats, given his quirks and peculiarities. Often, I think of a poem as a snapshot. This is what the persona felt at a given time. If there’s a shift in opinion or outlook, a second poem is in order. I know poets revise. Auden was particularly famous for it. But I wonder what they are doing.
Are they replacing the original? Do they consider the second a companion piece? A whole new work? Ultimately, it questions what permanence should be afforded a particular work. Is it meant for the ages or of a time? Is each a draft towards a final statement or are they all breadcrumbs?
This final is about Gonne as well, written in 1912. Yeats could be contradictory and here he is going on about what has been lost. He was of many minds about many things. He couldn’t resist “what’s gone.”
Fallen Majesty
Although crowds gathered once if she but showed her face,
And even old men’s eyes grew dim, this hand alone,
Like some last courtier at a gypsy camping-place
Babbling of fallen majesty, records what’s gone.The lineaments, a heart that laughter has made sweet,
These, these remain, but I record what’s gone. A crowd
Will gather, and not know it walks the very street
Whereon a thing once walked that seemed a burning cloud.
