sexta-feira, 29 de maio de 2015

Maud Gonne & Yeats Met

Like a spirit from Niamh's underthly islands, beautiful, arrogant, teasing, intense, passionate, vulnerable, yet unatainble, Maud Gonne appeared out of nowhere on the Yeats doorstep in London. Or rather, out of Dublin, from where she brought a letter of introduction from O´Leary's daughter Ellen.
 
Maud was a member of Young Ireland, her irish nationalism all the more passionate because it was to her a country of adoption and choice. She was born in England in 1864, and her father was a well-off professional soldier who had been posted with his regiment to Dublin Castle. She had growh up as a daughter of the English Ascendancy. It was her experience of the poverty and exploration of the Irish peasantry that fired her to turn her back on England and indeed to come to hate it. She was young, beautiful, rich and free, moving at her pleasure from Paris to Dublin to London. Both her parents were dead.
 
Willian Yeats was a year older, poor, living somewhat claustrophobically with na invalid mother, two sisters, his brother and his father. He was tal, over six feet, and gangling. Untidy black hair dangled over his brow. His clothes were shabby yet worn with a certain flamboyance, as if to say 'this is my choice, not my need'. Finding a kindred spirit, Maud, flouting convention, invited him to dine with her that evening. They dined together again every day of her nine-day visit to London. By the end of it he was captived, and his painful awareness of their circunstances did nothing to reduce the growing obession he now felt.
 
 
The Irish Biographies, W.B. Yeats, David Ross
 
E assim começa o amor que marca a vida de Yeats. Comecei a ler esta biografia há uns dias. Há uns anos ofereceram-me um Cd sobre o Yeats ( misturava a biografia com poemas dele) e eu, tal como ele se apaixona pela Maud, apaixonei-me por ele. Acho-o uma personalidade muito rica. Desde essa altura que acho que deviam fazer um filme sobre ele. Embora ache difícil que venha a acontecer, ainda não perdi totalmente a esperança.

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