April soft and cold: For he gave all his heart

We need someone with gravitas to close out National Poetry Month, and I can think of no one better qualified for that than William Butler Yeats. Because you know how I love Yeats.

In the past I’ve given you the apocalyptic and the historical (“Second Coming” and “Easter, 1916”), and one related to the First World War (“An Irish Airman Foresees his Death”). I’m going to dial it back to the eternal subject of poetry, love—the positive and the not-so-positive.

Yeats had a powerful passion for a woman named Maud Gonne—I mean, he was hopelessly in love with her. And she spurned him. As in, he proposed marriage to her four times over a period of ten years, and she turned him down every time. Even worse, she married the Irish nationalist John MacBride, who was an abusive drunk.

(After MacBride was executed by the British following the Easter Uprising in 1916, Yeats tried one more time. With the same result. Oh—and then he proposed to Gonne’s 22-year-old-daughter, who also refused him. Look, artists, poets—whaddya gonna do?)

Yeats had other affairs, and following his rejection by Gonne mere et fille, he married Georgie Hyde Lees (whom he met through one of his lovers). They had a happy marriage, with two children, but I’m thinking it wasn’t that full-bore heart-wrenching feeling he had for Gonne. It’s hard, after all, to sustain that kind of thing over time.

So it’s no real surprise to me that Yeats cautions us against rushing wholeheartedly into love. Even though, of course, he was unable to follow his own advice.

“Never Give All the Heart”

Never give all the heart, for love

Will hardly seem worth thinking of

To passionate women if it seem

Certain, and they never dream

That it fades out from kiss to kiss;

For everything that’s lovely is

But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.

O never give the heart outright,

For they, for all smooth lips can say,

Have given their hearts up to the play.

And who could play it well enough

If deaf and dumb and blind with love?

He that made this knows all the cost,

For he gave all his heart and lost.

And on that bittersweet note, National Poetry Month comes to an end. I hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as I have.