William Butler Yeats as a love poet

William Butler Yeats is considered to be a great love poet. The bulk of his lyric poetry deals with love. In his early love lyrics, love is vague, fleeting emotion, the poet is more in love with love itself than with any particular lady. It was his meeting with Maud Gonne at the age of twenty-three, that transformed Yeats in a great love poet.

He fell instantly in love with her, his devotion was passionate and life-long, and henceforth Maud Gonne is everywhere in his poetry.

Many poets have boasted that they will immortalize the beauty of the woman they loved, but few have succeeded as Yeats has succeeded in immortalizing the classical beauty and majestic form of his beloved. The dark mistress of Shakespeare, and Sidney's beloved, despite their passionate love, remain mere shadows in their sonnets. A painter could have told us better and much more about-

But if every painting of Maud Gonne vanished, something her would remain credible in Yeats verses.

He painted her as words can dynamically, seeing her body as but an expression of the soul, as in the following lines:

With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind

That is not natural in an age like this, Being high and solitary and most stern.

Or int following lines:

Tall and noble but with face and bosom Delicate in colour as apple blossom.

No facet of Maud Conne's physical charm and stature has escaped Yeats's power of observation. She has been portrayed in words of exceptional communicating potentiality. Her body has been transfigured and stated to be expressive of her soul. Yeats values courtesy more than physical beauty. It is courtesy enables even those who are not entirely beautiful to win the heart of others.

In his personal life, Yeats loved Maud Gonne for the sake of her over-much beauty and thought that he was loved in return. But the kindness and courtesy of Mrs Georgie ultimately won his heart, and he married her. So the poet says:

In courtesy, I'd have her chiefly learned;

Hearts are not had as a gift by hearts are earned

By those that are not entirely beautiful;

In the poem A Prayer for My Daughter, Yeats wishes his daughter not to have strong opinions of an intellectual kind because such opinions lead only to suffering and unhappiness. He cites the example of the loveliest woman, Maud Gonne, who came of a rich aristocratic family, but whose strong intellectual opinions, made a mere windbag of her. It was owing to her strongly held opinions that Maud Gonne acted so foolishly. She was so beautiful and so well-born, and yet she ruined her happiness and her chances in life by marrying John Mac Bride, a worthless “vainglorious lout”, “full of sound and fury signifying nothing”.

Thus Yeats is one of the greatest love poets of English language and the complexity and authenticity of the feeling of his love poems along with his intensity and his expression of the sense of loss resulting from failure in love, all go into ranking him with the other great love poets.