No Second Troy

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  • No Second Troy
    • Context
      • Yeats had a long love affair with Gonne who rejected him many times. Despite the fact he wrote many love poems to her, this one takes a more harsh tone, in which he partly blames her for the revolutions in Ireland, just like Helen of Troy was partly to blame for the Trojan war.
        • Helen of Troy was supposed to be the most beautiful woman in ancient Greece
    • Form
      • Douzaine, like Shakespeare's Sonnet 126. The poem has loose iambic pentameter, which gives it a controversial sound. (this is fitting)
    • Stanza
      • One
        • Yeats begins by asking why he should blame "her" for she filled his days with "misery"
      • Two
        • Yeats goes from discussing Gonne's "fiery" mind to her appearance, which is like a "tight bow", something which looks graceful/noble but contains a lot of tension and power
          • She is "high" in beauty and it is "solitary" yet "most stern"
      • Three
        • Is another rhetorical question- he decides that he cannot blame her anymore, it is just who she is.
      • Four
        • Here Yeats directly compares Maude and Helen. He asks if there was "another Troy for her to burn?" like her compared, beautiful trouble-maker friend. Yeats thinks that if there was another Troy, she would have burned it, but there wasn't, so, like Helen, she continued breaking hearts of poets, but stiring up protests against the British instead
    • Themes
      • Love
      • Politics/warefare
      • Lost love

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