Disenchantment with the Modern Age in Yeats No Second...

Disenchantment with the Modern Age in Yeats No Second Troy No Second Troy expresses Yeats most direct vision of Maud Gonne, the headstrong Irish nationalist he loved unrequitedly throughout his life. The poem deals with Yeats’ disenchantment with the modern age: blind to true beauty, unheroic, and unworthy of Maud Gonnes ancient nobility and heroism. The ignorant men, without courage equal to desire, personify Yeats’ assignment of blame for his failed attempts at obtaining Maud Gonnes love. The poets vision of his beloved as Helen of Troy externalizes his blame by exposing the modern ages lack of courage and inability to temper Maud Gonnes headstrong heroism and timeless beauty. Yeats wrote this poem in†¦show more content†¦Yeats writes in his Autobiography, I came to hate her politics, my one visible rival. After defining her politics as the teaching of most violent ways, he asks, What could she have done being what she is? Here, Gonnes political life is one of the external factors on which Yeats blames the failure of their relationship. The second half of the poem deals with the poets description of his beloved, establishing his vision of her as Helen of Troy. The poems title answers its final question, Was there another Troy for her to burn? Clearly, a connection can be made between Troy, burned at war over Helens beauty, and Ireland, under the increasing threat of war with England. Yeats disapproves of Maud Gonnes provocation of England, realizing that hurling the little streets upon the great would end in tragedy. Alasdair D.F. Macrae makes an important point about the poems reference to Troy: The poems title provides an answer to [the] questions in that, without another Troy against which [Maud Gonne] can use her destructive power, Yeats himself becomes the thing to be destroyed. The idea of Yeats personalizing the reference to Troy makes sense in that the heart of the poem deals with the assignment of blame. In an attempt to externalize his feelings of failure in regards to his relationship with Maud Gonne, Yeats himself becomes the victim. It is not he, but the unheroic modern age