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Few men have waited so long to have their love requited as William Butler Yeats. When
Yeats first met the Irish Nationalist revolutionary Maud Gonne in 1889, he was enthralled by her
beauty and fire. As well as immortalising her in verse, comparing her to Helen of Troy,
he proposed to her four times between 1891 and 1901. She turned him down each time. choosing
instead to marry a fellow Nationalist, Major John MacBride, in 1903. The marriage was a
wreck, and the pair divorced amid accusations of his domestic violence. Gonne and Yeats
maintained their friendship, and in 1908 she allowed him to consummate their relationship
just once. Both appeared to regret their night together, although Yeats did propose to her
once more, in 1916. When she refused, he proposed to her 21-year-old daughter, Iseult, who also
rejected him. Maude Gonne died alone. But the love she inspired is preserved in Yeats's
great poems of romantic yearning. Though the poem looks like a sonnet, it isn't.
"No Second Troy" plays out through four rhetorical questions.
WHY should I blame her that she filled my days / With misery describes the pain of Yeats'
unrequited love.
... that she would of late / Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways refers to Irish
nationalists drawn to both her beauty and her nationalistic tendencies. That Yeats refers
to them as 'ignorant' implies Maud's intelligence. They were the type who strap on bombs to themselves
and cause violence.
A line of the poem : Or hurled the little streets upon the great, where 'little streets'
is a reference to Irish nationalists and commoners rising up against the strength of a great
British Empire. Yeats, it seems, has little confidence that the level of what they desire-
an autonomous Ireland- would be met by an equal level of courage, hence the line: Had
they but courage equal to desire.
Lines 6 through 10: Yeats exalts his would-be love above what he condemns in his own time
(not natural in an age like this / Being high and solitary), and predicates upon her qualities
of a goddess (peaceful, nobleness,beauty), even a warrior goddess (fire, like a tightened
bow, most stern). The tightened bow alludes to Odysseus of Homer's the Odyssey.
Then comes- an apocalyptic consideration, a consideration which seems to be a synthesis
of the empirical and ethereal tones of the poem as a whole: Was there another Troy for
her to burn. In one breath Yeats refers to both Helen of Troy and 'Maud of Ireland'-
where Ireland, another Troy, is set ablaze by a large and formidable foe (the fate of
ancient Troy). Yeats abhorred violence and would not be the
warrior guerrilla that Maude Gonne wanted around her.