A Mouthful of Air: Poet Town and W.B. Yeats's spiritual marriage to Maud Gonne
Mixing interviews with contemporary poets on their writing with his own exploration of classic works from the likes of Chaucer, Emily Dickinson and DH Lawrence, McGuinness doesn’t shy away from textual analysis but rather explains concepts to listeners to unfold myriad meanings from the page.
Mark gives poems what they most need, and what poetry lovers most crave: space. Space to breathe, space to be heard, space to resonate.
The occasion for the interview was the publication of my poem ‘Recalling Brigid’ in Poet Town: The Poetry of Hastings & Thereabouts. I read the poem and then Mark gently drew out the stories behind it.
We spoke about myth and memory, about the women who held the world together quietly (and those who still do), about the threads that bind Irish poetry to its oldest roots, about Norman Conquest, religious takeovers, and the female power that withstands it all.
You can listen in here.
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If you’d like to explore the anthology that welcomed the poem, do check out Poet Town: The Poetry of Hastings & Thereabouts — a project that has done so much to amplify the voices of poets along my stretch of sea.
That handsome volume would make a great Christmas gift for any lover of words.
As you can see from 'Recalling Brigid,' the poetry within stretches far beyond Hastings, as well as including classic poetry section with plum offerings from the likes of Keats, Lord Byron, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, and both Rosettis, Gabriel and Christina. Lizzie Siddal too.
Poet Town was the brainchild of its editor, Richard Newham-Sullivan. With a foreword by Salena Godden, it brings together the best classic, modern and spoken word poets linked to this uniquely creative coastal town.
'Poet Town is a book where some truth is shared, some magical inspiration is found and all the weather is weathered. These poems are from here, they are deep and salty, they are lurking in the crash of sea water around the legs of the pier, as much as they are wafting in the salt and vinegar on your fish and chips.' Salena Godden, from the foreword The anthology includes Godden, Henry Normal, Iain Sinclair, Brian Moses, AK Benedict, Tim Rice and many other great contemporary poets, including Richard who is himself a fine poet, writing as Richard Evans. You can purchase the book hereA Mouthful of Air: W.B. Yeats's Spiritual Marriage to Maud Gonne
As the author of A Life Before and A Crowd of Stars, I also have to give a nod to the name of Mark's podcast, and its source, the W.B. short lyric ‘He Thinks of Those Who Have Spoken Evil of His Beloved,' in which the poet makes a strong statement against Dublin gossip about his beloved and very public muse, Maud Gonne.He Thinks of Those Who Have Spoken Evil of His Beloved Half close your eyelids, loosen your hair, And dream about the great and their pride; They have spoken against you everywhere, But weigh this song with the great and their pride; I made it out of a mouthful of air, Their children’s children shall say they have lied.The poem was first published in the May 1898 issue of The Dome, together with a second offering from Yeats, ‘He Hears the Cry of the Sedge,’ in which he writes of the pain of his spiritual marriage to Gonne.
He Hears the Cry of the Sedge I wander by the edge Of this desolate lake Where wind cries in the sedge: Until the axle break That keeps the stars in their round, And hands hurl in the deep The banners of East and West, And the girdle of light is unbound, Your breast will not lie by the breast Of your beloved in sleep.
Yeatsian critics have often cast the famed spiritual marriage as a tactical manipulation by Gonne to keep her poet interested, while not delivering the sexual goods. Yet it was likely Yeats who proposed the arrangement: in matters spiritual he led her, just as in Irish politics she led him.
And spiritual marriage was not uncommon in the occult circles in which Yeats and Gonne moved in the 1890s.
Golden Dawn papers describe partners sitting face-to-face in a darkened temple, sometimes naked, matching breath rhythms until the nādīs ‘ignite with liquid fire,’ sealing the creative and receptive magnetism.’ In this fusion, the object was not orgasm but sublimation until erotic tension, held just below the threshold of consummation, would rise up the spine and explode in clairvoyance or inspired speech.
Spiritual spouses testified that the resulting intimacy—sharing visionary landscapes, experiencing synchronous heartbeats, hearing each other’s thoughts—felt more naked and more connecting than physical love.
Yeats may have instigated it, but the spiritual marriage was hellish for him. In the first draft of his autobiography, completed by the beginning of 1917, he wrote of this time,I was tortured by sexual desire and disappointed love. Often as I walked in the woods at Coole, it would have been a relief to have screamed aloud. [It was the most miserable time of my life.] When desire became an unendurable torture, I would masturbate and that, no matter how moderate I was, would make me ill. (Au, p165)Gonne read both poems on a boat-and-train trip from Dublin to London. In a letter she tells him how she ‘read over & over again your poem until I didn’t need the book to read it, it is so beautiful.’ She doesn’t say which of the two poems she means, but surely it was the ‘Cry of the Sedge’? Gonne would have considered the noble pain it stylizes, even sanctifies, to have been a beautiful thing, whereas she tended to breezily wave away references to the scandal that swirled around her. In 'He Thinks of Those Who Have Spoken Evil Against His Beloved,' which gives Mark's podcast its name, Yeats addresses that scandal directly for the first time, scorning those who have spoken against his beloved muse and offering his poems as her protection. This is the other side of the spiritual marriage, in which he casts himself as guardian and defender, repelling the slander that surrounded her with prophetic certainty. His words will, in time, outweigh any public censure. Time will avenge her because of his song, made out of ‘a mouthful of air.’ She never asked him to do this and what make this poem so poignant for Yeatsians is what he was shortly to learn about his beloved. While we, 'their children's children,' must admit that our ancestors' did indeed lie in their gossip about Maud Gonne (one rumour Yeats had heard was that she had had aborted a child of which he was the father), not everything they said was untrue. As Yeats would discover when she made advances to him in December 1898, his virgin-queen, whom he had helped to position as Ireland's Joan of Arc, was actually a mother of two, one deceased, and living in Paris with their father, her longtime lover, a French right-wing orator and politician, Lucien Millevoye. The spiritual marriage inspired their work--hers as well as his--but simultaneously deepened their psychic wounds and reinforced their emotional avoidance. While it actually suited them both to channel their complex feelings into rituals and avoid real intimacy, at this time in their relationship, the unresolved tensions were rising. It would all to come to a head, shortly. Meantime, the beautiful poems of pain remain to tell the tale and inspire further books and podcasts.
- You can hear Mark read the poem and his detailed and fascinating exposition here.
- I hope you enjoy the conversation and that it encourages you to explore more poetry from A Mouthful of Air and, indeed, more poetry from Poet Town.