On 30 January 1889, at the age of twenty-three, Yeats first met the beautiful actress Maude Gunn, who was twenty-two years old and the daughter of a British colonel in Ireland, who had recently inherited a large inheritance after the death of her father. Not only was Maude Gunn beautiful and slender, but after feeling the miserable condition of the Irish people being oppressed by the British, she began to sympathize with the Irish people, and resolutely gave up the social life of Dublin high society to devote herself to the movement for Irish national independence, and became one of the leaders. This added a special halo to Maude Gunping in Yeats's mind.
Calligraphy works of Wang Shumin, a national first-class calligrapher
Yeats fell in love with Maud Gon at first sight, and had always been fond of him, and Yeats described the first time he saw Maud Gon: "She stood by the window, and beside her was a large clump of apple blossoms; she was dazzling, as if she were a petal sprinkled with sunlight. Yeats was deeply in love with her, but felt hopeless because of the noble image she had formed in his mind, and the young Yeats felt that he was "immature and lacking in achievement", so that although the love affair tormented him, he had not yet confessed to her, either because of shyness and because he felt that she could not marry a poor student. In July 1891, Yeats misunderstood the message of a letter she was writing to her, believing that she had hinted at her love, and immediately rushed to propose to Maud Gunn for the first time. She refused, saying she couldn't marry him but wanted to keep a friendship with Yeats. Since then, Maude Gang has always rejected Yeats's pursuit. She married an Irish officer, Major McBride, in 1903, a marriage that was later treacherous and even a disaster, but she was so stubborn that she refused Yeats's pursuit even when the marriage was completely frustrated. Nevertheless, Yeats's love for her was unswerving, so the insurmountable pain filled Yeats for a long time in his life.
Yeats waited, even though his crush was already someone else's wife and didn't get married until he was 52. It was after Maude Gang, who had already died, rejected Yeats' marriage proposal again, and after Yeats's proposal to Maud Gang's daughter Isabella was rejected, Yeats finally stopped this hopeless thought. But in fact, Yeats still can't forget Maud Gang. In the last months of his life, he also wrote letters to Maud Gunn asking her to come out for tea, but was still refused. Moreover, Maude Gunn adamantly refused to attend his funeral.
The pain and misfortune of Yeats's hopeless love for Maude Gang prompted Yeats to write many poems directed at Maude Gang, and over the course of several decades, from a variety of perspectives, Maud Gang continued to inspire Yeats's creation; sometimes passionate love, sometimes desperate resentment, and more often the complex tension between love and hate.
Wang Shumin, a national first-class calligrapher