![]() ![]() Katherine Tynan, a friend of the family, had told them that all her male friends, young and old, were in love with Maud, but ‘they soon got over it. The Yeats family had heard of Maud’s great beauty, yet her name was not linked with any of the men around Dublin. I could weep that the old is out of season. There’s no man may look upon her, no man, Made out of a wild thought, is in my marrow. I thought of your beauty, and this arrow, He wrote a poem - The Arrow - to honour this first meeting: A complexion like the blossoms of apples, and yet face and body had the beauty of lineaments which Blake calls the highest beauty because it changes least from youth to age, and a stature so great that she seemed of a divine race … she brought into my life … a sound as of a Burmese gong, an over-powering tumult that had yet many pleasant secondary notes.’ ![]() It belonged to famous pictures, to poetry, to some legendary past. Yeats: ‘I had never thought to see in a living woman so great beauty. She now turned to him and declared she had cried over certain passages.įrom first sight, Willie was in love with Maud - ‘the troubling of my life began.’ Of this first meeting he wrote in Memoirs of W.B. In an effort to steer her towards Ireland’s cultural aspirations, John O’Leary had given Maud a copy of Willie’s recently published poetry. was totally opposed to violence, but Willie was so smitten by her great beauty that he was slow to disagree with her. Maud’s Nationalism had taken a militant form and she felt that, in a political struggle, the end justified the means, even if these means were violent. Political prisoners had been taken but the power of the British landowners was being eroded by the Land League. She talked to both men about Irish problems - Ireland, dominated by its neighbour for six hundred years, was once more fighting for its rights. Turning away from the rest of the family, Maud gave her attention to J.B. She is immensely tall and very stylish … she has a rich complexion and hazel eyes and is, I think, decidedly handsome.’ According to Samuel Levenson she recorded her impressions in her diary that evening: ‘Miss Gonne, the Dublin beauty (who is marching on to glory over the hearts of the Dublin youths), called today on Willie, of course, but also apparently on Papa. Her sister, Elizabeth (nicknamed Lolly) was a student mistress at Chiswick High School. She was to note that Maud wore slippers at this first meeting. Susan Mary, known as Lily, worked as an embroideress under May Morris. Willie’s two sisters were particularly intrigued with this interesting visitor who had abandoned a social life in the viceregal court for Irish Nationalism. His brother Jack, then 16, was to follow in his father’s footsteps as an artist. ![]() Willie, his son, then aged 23, had just published The Wanderings of Oisín and other poems with the help of John O’Leary. J.B., the father and very much the dominant member of the family, had high aesthetic ideals but little money he earned a precarious living from portrait-painting. Most of our male friends admire her.’Īll the Yeatses assembled in the sitting room to welcome Maud - all except Mrs Yeats who had recently suffered a stroke. An artist and a poet could not fail to admire her. I’m sure she and you will like each other. Ellen had written to Willie, ‘I gave Miss Gonne, a new lady friend of ours and new convert to love of Ireland, a letter of introduction to your father. She had a letter of introduction from Ellen O’ Leary, sister of John, the well-known Irish Nationalist. Maud Gonne had come to call on John Butler (J.B.) Yeats and his son, Willie (W.B.). She had red-gold hair and hazel eyes, and was said to be ‘well dressed in a careless fashion’. Its passenger, a striking 22 year-old woman who had come from Belgravia, asked the driver to wait. It stopped outside Number 3, Blenheim Road, the home of the Yeats family. On 30 January 1889, a hansom cab drove along a quiet, tree-lined street in London’s suburb of Chiswick.
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