![]() ![]() Shortly after, Maud apologized to Yeats, telling him that she could never be his wife, and finally sharing the story of her affair with Millevoye and the birth of her two children by him. Yeats later wrote that it was then that the two shared their first actual kiss. Maud’s secret life came to light in November of 1898, when the couple found themselves in Dublin together. In 1894, she became pregnant by Millevoye once again, this time giving birth to her daughter, Iseult, again without Yeats’ knowledge, despite the intensity of their written correspondence and the depth of the emotional bond between them. When it became impossible for her to conceal her grief at Georges’ death from Yeats, Maud informed him that a child she had adopted had passed away. Within three months of her initial meeting with Willie in London, Maud became pregnant by Millevoye with her first child, son Georges, who died of illness at seventeen months of age. Yet despite her oft spoken convictions that sexual love was unfulfilling, and should exist only for procreation and her aversion to marriage, which she believed was an institution of no benefit to a woman, Maud Gonne was a woman of contradiction…and secrecy. None of these relationships were to prove lasting, as one by one his various lovers came to understand the hold that Maud continued to have over him. At various times, he became involved with other, arguably more suitable partners. While appreciative of their “spiritual marriage”, Yeats eventually recognized the need for a more earthly type of fulfillment. She saw their union as one of their intellects, spirits and souls. ![]() ![]() By this time, heavily involved with Yeats in his pursuit of mysticism and the occult and initiated by Yeats in the Secret Society of the Golden Dawn, Maud wrote often in her letters to Willie of their bridging the geographical distance between them through astral projection and meditation. Never one for convention, Maud in turn proposed a type of “spiritual marriage” that existed at a deeper level and for a higher purpose than mere mortal love. Throughout the years, he was to propose to her no fewer than three times. In fact, much of Yeats’ work centers on the unrequited and tumultuous aspects of his relationship with Maud Gonne. My world was fallen and over, for your dark soft eyes on it shone A thousand years it had waited and now it is gone, it is gone. ![]() Yeats’ feelings toward Maud at times clearly bordered on the obsessive, as he was to write in Cycles Ago, subtitled “In Memory of Your Dream One July Night”. The precise nature of the relationship between them, however, remains a subject of strong debate. Yeats, the dreamer, mystic, and ideologist, and Maud Gonne the living embodiment of those qualities as evidenced by her almost boundless energy for activism and passion for social causes as evidenced by her work on behalf of evicted tenants. Drawn together by a mutual love for Ireland- where Maud had spent the better part of her childhood in Howth- and in turn Irish Nationalism, they found in each other a type of symbiosis. Confident, cosmopolitan, and well-traveled, she had lived in Dublin, London, and France at various times in her young life, and it was in the latter that she became embroiled in an affair with the married French nationalist, publisher, and politician, Lucien Millevoye.Īlthough the affair with Millevoye was very much alive at the time of her first meeting with Yeats in 1889, Maud and Willie, as she affectionately referred to him found much to admire in each other. Sligo, born to a family of modest means, Maud Gonne could have been nothing less than a force of nature. To the young, introspective poet from Co. It could rightfully be considered in an inauspicious start to a great love story, when years later one half of the storied couple reflects on the day of their first meeting as the day that “the troubling of my life began”, yet that is exactly how William Butler Yeats was to describe his first meeting with Maud Gonne on the 30 th of January, 1889. ![]()
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