Paschal moon: a brief, dreamy kind delight

Final day of National Poetry Month, so we’ll go out with another heavy hitter.

Like Dorothy Parker, William Butler Yeats loved not wisely, but too well. The main passion of his life was Maud Gonne. He once stated that her (first) rejection of his marriage proposal (in 1891, two years after they met) marked the point at which “the troubling of my life began”. He proposed three more times over the next ten years, and was turned down every time. The man she did choose, John MacBride, was an appalling, abusive human being, but he shared her deep, radicalIrish nationalism, which Yeats did not. After her unsuccessful attempt to divorce MacBride, Yeats—who had supported her in the effort—finally physically consummated the relationship, but even that was…unsatisfying, and their friendship faded after the single sexual encounter.

Even so, when John MacBride was executed following the Easter Rebellion of 1916, Yeats proposed one final time to Gonne. And one final time she said no. Frankly, the proposal was kind of by rote, and he was somewhat relieved by her response. Then, the 56-year-old poet started going middle-age crazy. He developed a fixation on…Iseult Gonne, Maud’s 21-year-old daughter by her pre-MacBride lover Lucien Millevoie. Iseult followed in her mother’s footsteps by rejecting Yeats’s 1917 proposal.

By now he was feeling a desperate urge to produce an heir, so within a few months of being shown the romantic door by Iseult, he proposed to 25-year-old Georgie Hyde-Lees. That relationship was a success, and produced two children, though he took lovers throughout his life.

Well, anyway, the Yeats-Gonne relationship really scarred the poet deeply, as witnessed by today’s entry.

“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.

This is the sort of thing you expect from poets—that thrill-of-victory-agony-of-defeat in love, so it seems appropriate that it should close us out for this year.