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Dear Zazie, Here is today’s Lover’s Almanac from Cowboy Coleridge to his muse.  Follow Cowboy on twitter @cowboycoleridge.  Hope you are well.  You must be very busy.  Do not forget to take care of yourself.  Rhett

The Lover’s Almanac

Dear Muse,

Today is WB Yeats‘ birthday.  One of my very favorite poets.  He was born in 1865 in Sandymount, County Dublin, Ireland.  In 1889, he first met Maud Gonne, who he fell in love with.  But she, was in love with Lucien Millevoye a French journalist and right-wing politician with whom she would have two children.  Many of Yeats’s poems are inspired by her, or mention her.  He wrote the plays The Countess Cathleen and Cathleen Ní Houlihan for her.  His poem Aedh wishes for the Cloths of Heaven ends with a reference to her:

I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Few poets have celebrated a woman’s beauty to the extent Yeats did in his lyric verse about Gonne.  From his second book to Last Poems, she became the Rose, Helen of Troy (in No second Troy), the Ledaean Body (Leda and the Swan and Among School Children), Cathleen Ní Houlihan, Pallas Athene and Deirdre.  Gonne turned down several proposals from Yeats before marrying John McBride with whom she would have a son, Seán MacBride.  She and MacBride would separate in 1904.  Gonne and Yeats finally consummated their relationship in Paris in 1908.  Yeats’ long years of fidelity, so to speak, were rewarded at last, although Yeats would later remark that “the tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul.”  The relationship did not develop into a new phase after their night together.  Soon afterwards, Gonne wrote to the poet indicating that despite the physical consummation, they could not continue as they had been: “I have prayed so hard to have all earthly desire taken from my love for you and dearest, loving you as I do, I have prayed and I am praying still that the bodily desire for me may be taken from you too.”  By January 1909, Gonne was sending Yeats letters praising the advantage given to artists who abstain from sex.  Nearly twenty years later, Yeats recalled the night with Gonne in his poem “A Man Young and Old”:

My arms are like the twisted thorn
And yet there beauty lay;
The first of all the tribe lay there
And did such pleasure take;
She who had brought great Hector down
And put all Troy to wreck.

 

I never tire of tellin’ that story.  So he had a muse and a great unrequited love.  And then to have consummated that love at long last; in Paris!  How could life be any better!  And then to lose her!  How could life be more bitter!  How well I know the better and the bitter.  If Gonne was correct about the advantage given to artists who abstain from sex, then I can look forward to a writing windfall.

dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep. – WB Yeats

Still,

CC

 

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