The Image of Maud Gonne in Yeast’s Selected Poems of The Rose

Abstract

Yeat's love poetry in his first volume The Rose is best understood in close relation to Maud Gonne .He finds in his love with Maud Gonne a cornerstone and a driving force which gains complete hold over his imagination and intellect .This love becomes an indispensable condition for the attainment of an idyllic world and the highest ascension towards an intellectual and ideal vision. As such , it forms the focal point in Yeats's whole existence since it is associated with ideal concepts , beauty , nobility , and his dream of building an idealized world .

Maud was an actress, a nationalist and a public figure who was to fit Yeats’s desire to change his whole altitude to life and poetry. Although they shared a passion for Iresh nationalism, Yeats’s was skeptical of her extremist nationalist politics "trapped out" with her beauty:

I had never thought to see a living women of such
great beauty. It belonged to famous pictures, to
poetry, to some legendary past. A complexion like the
blossom 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. Her movements were worthy of her form, and I
understood at lost why the poet of antiquity.