Unrequited Love: Yeats

Helen of Troy, famously the most beautiful woman in the world, merits varying descriptions as to her role in the entire Trojan War. It was she who began the whole war by leaving her husband for another man, thus causing the two men to fight; however, perhaps her beauty made her role in the war a foregone conclusion, rather than a mistake on her part. William Butler Yeats uses this ambiguity to describe his own Helen—named Maud Gonne—and her effect upon him. He begins his “No Second Troy” by musing, “Why should I blame her that she filled my days / With misery?” (lines 1-2). Maud cannot help her beauty or that men desire it, just as Helen of Troy could not help but be desired. No matter a beautiful woman’s decisions, even if she is the chastest woman in the world, her beauty can cause problems. When Yeats remarks that “she would of late / Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways” (lines 2-3), he may be speaking not of her having actually taught violence, but rather her beauty inspiring a sort of violence in him: a violence that kills not other men, but himself.

Ultimately Yeats decides that her character, regrettably, is unchangeable: “What could have made her peaceful with a mind / That nobleness made simple as a fire?” (lines 6-7). Her mind has “fire” in it, not peace as Yeats would wish her to have. Her beauty—along with all her other positive qualities—are nothing if the bad qualities remain forever. He even begins describing her beauty as less than ideal: her beauty is “like a tightened bow, a kind / That is not natural” (lines 8-9). A tightened bow is a cause for alarm, as it could shoot at any moment, killing or wounding anyone. Her beauty is like Helen’s: Helen must have enjoyed her beauty in her youth, getting preferential treatment and always being told of her loveliness, but once the “tightened bow” of Helen’s beauty went off, creating the situation with Paris described in Homer’s The Iliad, then she must well have wished that she had never been beautiful. Yeats regrets his lovely Maud being “high and solitary and most stern,” rather than pleasing to more than just the eye (line 10). Yet he knows, as he muses, “Why, what could she have done, being what she is?” (line 11), that it is not truly Maud’s fault that she inspired such churning emotions within him, just as it is not her fault that she is eternally unsatisfied with love and life, as Helen was.

However, since there is not “another Troy for her to burn” (line 12), Yeats’ Maud must burn something else: the poet himself. Yeats apparently proposed to her multiple times, being refused every single one of them (1116). As far as he is concerned, his Helen does not need a whole city to watch burn, since she has him. A cold beauty, hotly desired but determined to remain distant, Maud Gonne has beauty like a “tightened bow,” ready to go off at any time with unpredictable consequences. And like the situation with Helen, Yeats—like Paris—knows better than to get involved with such a woman, but he does so anyway, to his own disastrous consequence.