From ‘The Green Helmet and Other Poems

Abstract

The poems in this volume were originally presented under two subtitles: ‘Raymond Lully and His Wife Pernella’ and ‘Momentary Thoughts’. This division draws attention to the private–public dynamic of the volume. The first subtitle is esoteric, restrictive. This restriction is a matter of audiences; there is an audience of insiders who will understand. Indeed, Maud Gonne pointed out to Yeats that he had mistakenly used Lully’s name when he meant Nicolas Flamel.1 This section contains poems which mark a renewed closeness in Yeats’s relationship with Maud Gonne when their spiritual marriage was restored. The alchemist Nicolas Flamel’s wife Pernella, herself an adept, was supposed to share his skill. The story told of the couple is that both, after their apparent death, faked funerals, and were reunited to live on for the thousand years that is the usual span of the adept.2 The paralleling by Yeats of his relationship with Maud Gonne with the marriage of Flamel and Pernella suggests that this relationship has a significance to him greater than that of the ordinary life contained within the normal span. The naming of this section is, then, a way of projecting the poet and his ideal partner into legend. This is done rather secretively, through reference to an obscure, occultist couple. The poet’s expression of himself is guarded, the allusion restrictive, reflecting his sense of the need for a greater discipline in expression and a narrowing of his audience. This shows Yeats’s consciousness of the increasingly marginalized nature of his position in Ireland at this time.