In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, I’m thinking about a famously romantic poem: W.B. Yeats’s “When You are Old”. Beautiful poem, but the sort of thing that hardly cuts the ice anymore. First, to the poem itself:
When you are Old
by W.B. Yeats
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
The poem follows the tradition of a love-poem in the style of Carpe Diem usually translated as “seize the day”. In other words, it urges the beloved to consider that time passes, and that she will regret the loss of the love that he had once offered her. Yeats inscribed “When You are Old”, and other poems, into a white vellum-bound notebook and gave it to Maud Gonne. When you are old, he says in this sonnet, and when you read the lines of my poetry you will remember how beautiful you once were. In other words, obviously, once she is old, she is no longer beautiful. And then he elevates himself. He reminds her of the many admirers who love her beauty and grace. But he sets his own love apart from those who loved her for her appearance, her “grace” and “beauty”, saying that he loved her for her interior, her “pilgrim soul” and her “sorrows”. Well, I suppose it might be conceded that he is saying that he loves her more deeply than the others.
And then there is the hope he expresses. The sonnet, though rhymed in the Italian tradition and presented in three Shakespearean quatrains, stops at twelve lines and doesn’t have the expected closing couplet. These last two lines would usually offer a decisive conclusion in this kind of poem. Perhaps Yeats leaves out the two lines, of course, leaves the possibilities open. Toward the end of the poem he says, she will regret “how Love fled”, how she lost his love. Yeats would not wish this to be the outcome of his pursuit and the missing closing couplet would suggest the hope that Gonne will not grow old and regret the loss of his love. It must be said though that when Yeats puts himself and his love as pacing “upon the mountains overhead/And hid his face amid a crowd of stars” he exalts his future while, on the other hand, he diminishes hers; she sits sadly in her little domestic scene and dreams of her loss: him.
Maud Gonne, however, was far from the vulnerable and foolish figure Yeats represents here. She was not only wealthy and independent, she cut a dash with her Paris wardrobe and bohemian courage. She moved her household along with her menagerie of canaries, monkeys, cats and dogs between Ireland and France. She was a passionate political activist. Beyond her public speaking and her activities on behalf of tenants in the Irish Land wars, Gonne was very much a part of the French extreme nationalist Boulangist movement. Allied to that cause she published the L’Irlande Libre (Free Ireland) promoting Irish nationalism abroad.
More significantly and on a personal level, Yeats did not quite know the “pilgrim soul” as well as he thought. He did not know that Gonne was the lover of a married French journalist and politician, Lucien Millevoye and that two years before Yeats wrote “When You are Old”, Gonne and Millevoye had a son. The reality was, Yeats knew nothing of Gonne’s personal life and, though important to her, he was only one among her many admirers. Not only was she far beyond his reach, he was in love with his image of Gonne, and did not know the woman, herself, at all.
Thank you for introducing me to Maude Gonne. From my brief search online I see clearly she’s a fascinating woman. There are some wonderful photographs of her taken throughout her lifetime.